Ben Solomon
Sasha Zarezina, 8, said of her find as she dug for meteorites in Deputatskoye, Russia, "I will sell it for 100 million euros."
DEPUTATSKOYE, Russia — Ever since the meteor exploded somewhere over this impoverished Siberian town, Larisa V. Briyukova wondered what to do with the fist-size stone she found under a hole in the roof tiles of her woodshed.
On Monday, a stranger knocked on her door, offering about $60, Ms. Briyukova said. After some haggling, they settled on a price of $230. A few hours later, another man pulled up, looked at the hole in the roof and offered $1,300.
"Now I regret selling it," said Ms. Briyukova, a 43-year-old homemaker. "But then, who knows? The police might have come and taken it away anyway."
On Friday, terror rained from the skies, blowing out windows and scaring people over an enormous swath of Siberia. But by Monday, for many people what fell from the sky had turned to pure gold, and it touched off a rush to retrieve the fragments, many buried in deep February snows.
Many of those out prospecting looked a lot like Sasha Zarezina, 8, who happily plunged into a snowbank here in this village of a thousand, laughing, kicking and throwing up plumes of powdery snow.
Then she stopped, bent over and started to dig. "I found one!" she yelled.
A warm breath and a rub on her pants later, a small black pebble, oval like a river rock, charred and smooth, was freed of ice.
While trade in material from meteorites is largely illegal, there is a flourishing global market, with fragments widely available for sale on the Internet, usually at modest prices. At least one from the recent meteor was available on eBay on Monday for $32, and there is a Web site called Star-bits.com devoted to the trade — much to the displeasure of scientists and the countries where the objects were found.
Early on, NASA reported that the meteor, the largest known celestial body to enter Earth's atmosphere in 100 years, was an airburst fireball type that would shower untold thousands of fragments onto the surface.
In the scramble now under way to find them, residents of towns like this one — founded in the 1920s around a collective dairy farm that is now defunct — are looking for small holes in the snow that hold the promise of yielding up polished black rocks encased in tiny clumps of ice, formed from the last expiring heat of their long journey.
"All it takes is looking carefully," said Sasha, who was out searching after school on Monday. "The stones are in the snowdrifts. To find a stone you find a hole. And then you dig."
Villagers here have plastic bags, matchboxes and jars filled with dozens of stones. One even tore a hole in the coat one woman was wearing outside Friday morning.
But this is Russia, so the excitement became tinged with anxiety on Monday as unknown cars appeared, cruising the streets and bearing men who refused to answer questions but offered stacks of rubles worth hundreds, then thousands, of dollars for the fragments. Strangely, no authorities were anywhere in sight.
M3-Media, a financial news site, reported that under Russian law a person can gain legal title to a meteorite, but only if it is reported to the authorities and submitted to a laboratory for tests. The laboratory will charge 20 percent of the estimated value of the object for certification, the site reported, citing the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In practice, though, the search for remnants of the meteor has become a haphazard, unregulated scramble, wholly lacking coordinated effort or scientific oversight in the collection of specimens from one of the most significant events in years for the community of scientists who study such things.
"We don't have a mechanism to prevent this from happening," said Viktor Grokhovsky, an assistant professor of metallurgy at Southern Ural Federal University, one of the scientists who made the positive identification of meteorites on Monday.
Law enforcement agencies actually blocked scientists from visiting a suspected impact site on Lake Chebarkul over the weekend, Professor Grokhovsky said. Yet here at Deputatskoye, where the first scientific expedition is planned for Tuesday, not a police officer was in sight.
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