The first Gold Basin meteorite was found in an area of arroyos near the White Hills by Professor Jim Kriegh (UAz, emiritus) while prospecting for gold with a metal detector. Since this initial find, over 4000 more specimens have been recovered from the area by Kriegh, John Blennert and Ingrid Monrad for a scientific study conducted on behalf of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona.
Large strewn fields such as this occur when an asteroid explodes in the earth’s atmosphere. The Gold Basin asteroid was probably around 40-60 inches in diameter and it hit the top of the atmosphere with a kinetic energy equivalent to ~10 to 1000 tons of TNT.
Several samples of the Gold Basin meteorite have been dated and are estimated to be 14.3 thousand years old.