H5
Found October 30, 1983
30° 18' 42" N., 86° 10' W.
A large, unbroken, 11.3 kg stone was found about 200 meters from the high tide line and 1 meter below the surface by two treasure hunters, Mr. Phillip Gibson and Dr. John Green, while using metal detectors. They were searching for Spanish armor in an ancient Indian refuse heap near Grayton Beach, Florida when they found the 23 × 18 × 17.5 cm dark-brown stone. The stone is without a distinct fusion crust due to the presence of a silicate encrustation formed during its extended residence in wet sand.
Suspecting the stone was not from the area, they contacted the Earth Sciences Department at Pensacola Junior College where professors Wooten, Palma, and Exum concluded that it may be a meteorite. They sent a sample to Harold Povenmire of the Florida Fireball Patrol who initially thought it was a sedimentary ferriginous sandstone nodule commonly found along the coastal beaches of the southeast. However, after learning of the find circumstances and running some tests, including comparisons to known chondrites, he concluded that it was a meteorite. A small slice was subsequently sent to Glenn Huss of the American Meteorite Laboratory, who verified its meteoritical origin, and then to Dr. Andrew Graham of the British Museum of Natural History for classification. The photo above shows an 11.2 g specimen cut from the interior of the Grayton mass. The photo below shows the original mass as found.
Photo courtesy Meteoritics, vol. 19, 1984
Due in part to the intense temperature and moisture conditions in the state of Florida, only four meteorites have been found there to date, plus one recovered fall. In addition to Grayton, approximately 1 kg of L4 fragments were brought up in a net offshore of Lake Okechobee, a 502 g H4 stone was plowed up in Eustis, and a 41.8 kg H5 stone was found in Bonita Springs.
At 6:15 P.M. on November 8, 2004, Donna Shuford heard a meteorite bounce off her car and hit the side of her house. Fragments composing an ~180 g eucrite were recovered, representing the fifth Florida meteorite. Distribution details are not known.
