Meteorite Optimist Insists Magnetism Proves Status Despite Successful Streak Test

The streak plate had been back on the folding table for about four seconds when Del Krehmer said the test had gone exactly as he expected.

It had. The pencil-width line the corner of his rock had dragged across the unglazed tile was dark gray, nearly black, a little greasy where the ceramic had taken the mineral. That is the streak magnetite leaves. Iron meteorites tend to leave nothing at all, or a faint pale mark. The plate had no idea it was being used as evidence, and it did its job anyway.

Before any of that, I had recorded the invoice, because that is the order I work in. Krehmer paid $145 in March at the Ridgeline Gem and Mineral Expo for a fist-sized mass he describes as "heavy as a hand grenade and shaped like one." The dealer's card, which he has kept folded in a sandwich bag, reads: "Iron meteorite, unclassified, old collection, original find location lost." That last clause is doing more work than the first three.

The magnet came out of his pocket before the tile did. A small black refrigerator magnet clicked against the mass and stayed there when he held the rock sideways. "There," he said. "You explain that."

Priscilla Wend, who runs the identification table at the club, explained it. Magnetite is one of the most magnetic things you can pick up off the ground outside of a scrapyard. Magnetism narrows the field to about nine candidates and eliminates none of them in his favor. She said this gently, in the voice of someone who has said it at forty tables.

The hydrostatic weigh came next. Krehmer tied the rock with sewing thread, weighed it dry on the club's brass balance, then let it hang in a jar of water. Specific gravity landed at 5.1, give or take the wobble in the thread. Iron meteorites run closer to the sevens. A nicked corner, which he showed us himself rather than let anyone cut anything, looked granular where it should have looked like melted crust.

"Magnetism is a property, not a provenance," said Otis Vale, who issues rulings nobody asked for and who was not asked for this one either.

Krehmer did not dispute any number on the table. He disputed the order of operations. He wants the classification to rest on the magnet, because the magnet is the test he can repeat in his kitchen, at night, without an appointment. The streak plate requires a witness. Harold Loomis, who has been listening from the folding chair by the door with the patience of a man who lives with a collector, said only that it was a very good rock and very heavy, which he has now said three times.

Inez Fenn will log it in the monthly update as magnetite, purchased as an unclassified iron, find location lost on paper before it was lost to anyone alive. She does this quietly, and the group believes whatever appears under her heading.

Krehmer took the rock home in his coat pocket. Nobody asked him to give it up, and there was no reason to. A magnetite nodule the size of a fist that holds a magnet to itself without falling is not a bad thing to own. He has it on the shelf by the window, where the light gets it in the afternoon, and he says he will keep looking for the man who sold it to him. That is a fair next step, and it costs nothing to attempt.