With an area of 9,100,000 km2, the Sahara now offers the planet’s greatest potential for discovering meteorites. Effective prospecting in an environment as vast and hostile as this requires an excellent knowledge of soil types, as well as the geological and climatic mechanisms that have over the years created certain areas presenting a good likelihood of finds.

While meteorites fall everywhere on earth, there are very few sites at which they will remain well preserved or visible on the surface. Meteorite preserving surfaces represent less than 5% of the desert’s area.

HISTORY OF DISCOVERIES

The first Saharan research campaigns took place in 1989. Desert enthusiasts travelling through Algeria and Libya discovered that these areas held an important potential for meteorite finds on what was once sedimentary land that had been subjected to erosion. The emergence of GPS devices then made it possible to explore virgin territories in relative security. Such expeditions, which were conducted by Swiss and German meteorite hunters, would result in hundreds of specimens being collected within a few years. These were the first large-scale discoveries of meteorites from the hot deserts.

OFFICIAL NAME OF METEORITES

In view of the Sahara’s vastness and the absence of local communities, Saharan meteorites bear the names of the geographic regions in which they are discovered. In a plateau like Libya’s Dar al Gani, which covers 6,000 km2, more than a thousand meteorites were discovered on the surface. A sequence of letters and numbers serves to identify each meteorite taken from Dar al Gani. The reference DaG 001 was used for the first such stone catalogued, while DaG 597 was the 597th. This rule, which the Meteoritical Society uses for assigning names, is internationally recognized.