At the world’s The most famous meteorite show, in Ensisheim in France, I noticed that there were many Morocco traders. Unlike most of the Europeans and Americans – who had display cases and labels and books – the Moroccan stalls were minimalist. Maybe a white skin is covered with lumps of reddish rocks. Some scales. Sometimes a piece of paper with prices per kilogram written in Biro. It was only back in England that I learned from the Sahara gold rush.
Since 1999, the number of meteorites found in Morocco has exploded. The number officially recognized is more than a thousand – although scientists are described as “great underestimation”. By comparison, the UK has only 23 traps and findings.
“You have to talk to Hasnaa,” a trader, Darryl Pitt, wrote to me. “She tried to bring about the chaos of the North African meteorite trade in something more orderly in the chaos of the North African meteorite trade.” It wasn’t the first time her name came up.
Hasnaa Chennaoui Aoudjehane, a professor at Hassan II University of Casablanca, is used to being the outsider in the room. At meetings of the Meteoritical Society’s Committee for Meteorite Nomenclature, the group that called the officially recognized meteorites, she, when she was a member, was “the unique representative of any Arab or Muslim country”. (She remains a consultant with the committee.) As I tackled the subject of Morocco’s export, she moaned. “The situation with Moroccan meteorites is insane,” she says. “It’s unethical.”
At the end of the last century, several factors combined to make Morocco a meteor -hot place. First, climate and geography. It is a meteor that enables the difference in the total area, just as likely in the highlands of Scotland as in the Sahara, but in the former it will be much harder to find – the Heather, the rocks – and will ‘nature “Be much faster – the rain, the mud, the snow. Most (although not all) meteorites reach the earth with darker crust. In the Sahara, such rocks stand out against the sand.
Second, Morocco already had a network of Western fossil, mineral and archaeological hunters and traders, while many Moroccans – especially members of nomadic groups – were very skilled in the search for rocks and artifacts in the desert. As I walked with my herd, I looked at the ground, ”a nomad explained to a journalist from the Middle East eye. The stone industry, he said, saved many nomadic families from poverty.
Third, Morocco’s legal and geopolitical situation helped things. “We are, thank God, a peaceful land,” says Chennaoui. “It’s something unique in the region.” Here it is (relatively safe) to wander the Sahara sand in search of stones. Furthermore, there was no dedicated regulation of the country’s meteorites. If you found a meteorite in Morocco, it was probably you to do as you wished.
American trader Michael Gilmer places the beginning of the Sahara gold rush in the middle of the 1990s. Foreign traders quickly discovered that unclassified meteorites can be purchased at very low prices from Moroccan traders, formally analyzed in the West and sold for considerable profits.
The city of inheritance in the southeastern Drâa-Tafilalet region in Morocco, known as “The Gateway to the Sahara”, has become a hub for those hoping to make money from meteorites. A visitor will find stores selling meteorites and fossils, some with small ad hoc museums. Some nomads have diversified to take tourists and collectors to the desert to look for stones.