Meteorite Times Magazine Contents Paul Harris
Featured Articles Accretion Desk by Martin Horejsi Jim’s Fragments by Jim Tobin Bob’s Findings by Robert Verish Micro Visions by John Kashuba Norm’s Tektite Teasers by Norm Lehrman IMCA Insights by The IMCA Team Meteorite of the Month by Editor Tektite of the Month by Editor
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Meteorite Times Magazine A Three For Me? Meteorite Hunting at the Tucson Show Martin Horejsi
Back a number of years, I spent more than a few hours at the Tucson Show with Jim Tobin digging through boxes of unidentified NWA stones. There were pallets of rocks with most of the potential meteorites rolling around cardboard board boxes. It was clear that they had already been high-graded by the dealer with the most promising specimens already gone from the selection. However, in one box i found a relatively nondescript chondrite that under 10x magnification showed some features that made it worth the few dollars it would cost.
The problem was that the dealer keyed in right away that Jim and I were not just some rock collectors who perhaps wanted a meteorite just to have one. In other words, there must be a very good reason why Jim or I would be interested in something and likely it meant that someone else has missed it during the highgrading.
Back when meteorites were being harvested from the hot deserts, using a magnet was the first step. But what that actually did was make achondrites fall through the cracks because in the gold rush of NWA and Sahara xxx before that, 95% of the meteorites were chondrites so why bother teaching a potential meteorite hunter the confusing intricacies of achondrites.
Later, it became clear to the local hunters that all those rocks that were not attracted to a magnet might actually be worth much more than the ones that were. Further, as the local hunters got more savvy about meteorite features and values, the rush was on to pull out the best pieces and save them for later (in essence “banking� them), or charge more money per gram.
The locals became quite astute at reading level of enthusiasm of the “western collector.” And that talent was alive and well in Tucson. Knowing this, I chose a couple other “dud” meteorites to dilute my interest and made some off hand but clearly audible comments of picking up some gifts for kids who might like to own a real meteorite.
Once home, I made a few cuts into my stone and polished up the window. It was exactly what I expected and more. But I never got around to sending the specimen off for professional analysis. So I throw out some pictures to you to see what you all think. Could it be an L, an LL, H, C, R, other? Please post your comments and thoughts about what classification this might be. Until next time‌.
Meteorite Times Magazine Two More Newly Classified Meteorites James Tobin
As I cut meteorites to prepare them for sale I occasionally find one which is deserving of being classified. I would get them all classified if that was practical. But the realities of today are that ordinary chondrites are not being classified by many of the individuals who used to do them just 5 or especially 10 or more years ago. There are actually many fewer choices for us who find new meteorites or cut into a meteorite and want to get it classified. Well I ran into three meteorites a while back that were nice or unusual. We bought all of them about eight years ago. One stone was the topic of my article last issue. That was NWA10731. Almost as that article was coming out I heard from Cascadia Meteorite Lab about the two others I had sent them. So they will be the topic of this article. Paul Harris and I had a request from a customer for a large slice of meteorite to be used in public demonstrations and lectures. We did not have anything prepared that seemed to be near large enough. But we had a couple large stones we had never put in a saw. I chose the smaller of the two big unrelated stones for this customer’s slice. The largest stone has not been classified and likely will never be. But the smaller was nearly 7 kilograms and shaped like a rough sphere. Which made it about as hard to clamp in a rock saw as any stone can be. But I got a thick endpiece cut off and then took two more slices off. One of these was prepared for the customer with a polish on one side and the other side left at 400 grit to show off the structure a little differently. I noticed during that work that this was an interesting stone. It had occasional large chondrules of Ÿ inch or more in diameter. It had little metal and was a generally fresh meteorite internally. No rust spots or staining just a beige colored matrix when it came off the saw. I knew it would darken some when polished they always do.
I did not do anything with the stone at that time as far as sending it off for classification. We sent off the large slice and the man was happy. We used a little of it for a couple more special orders. A customer was making marbles of meteorites and a piece was used for one of those one inch cubes we produced.
I was cutting into some other stones a year or so later and found two more that were not run of the mill ordinary chondrites. I decided that since I was sending off these two newly discovered interesting stones I would send off a piece of the big stone too. It was a nice meteorite and it would be a shame to sell 7 kilograms of pieces unclassified. Could I get someone to look at it was the question. The place I had been sending specimens to for 20 years was no longer doing ordinary chondrites. So off a chunk went to Cascadia Meteorite Lab along with NWA10731 and the other one we will get to soon. You need to be patient in most things meteorite. When I began collecting there was no internet. Collectors waited for a price list to come in the mail from the few dealers that existed. We waited for something new to come on the market. It was not at all like the grocery store shopping we can do today. I had to be patient in collecting and I knew I would have to be patient later when I began getting them classified. It had often taken months in the past so I settled back to wait and find out what these three space treasures were. When I finally got information in an email on each one it is like another Christmas in the middle of the year. First, NWA10731 and then the big stone was finally done and on its way to the Nomenclature Committee for approval. I was looking at a summary of the data in my email and was very happy with the results. I knew it was not something really strange when I sent it, but to have it come back as an LL5 was nice. At any one time in the last few years there are a few LL5s for sell. There are the favorites like Tuxtuac, and Paragould that can usually be found for sell somewhere. Then on rarer occasions truly historic pieces like Siena might become available. But even a search for more recent desert LL5 material does not yield a lot of returns. Oh, I can not forget the huge amount of Chelyabinsk that has blessed us the last several years, it is an LL5. But I was happy to be told of the classification since there are only a few available at any time. There are over 3,000 LL5 meteorites listed in the Meteoritical Bulletin Database but once you take out the Antarctic finds it is a much smaller number. And there remains after taking those away plenty of recent desert finds of LL5s but they seem to never be for sale. We now had a nice big supply and it was a pretty meteorite. It received a W2 for its weathering state and that confirmed what I had seen visually that it was nice and quite fresh inside. It had a touch of shock with a level of S3. The specimens I sent off for classification did not have any of the really big chondrules or if they did they were not exposed in the cutting of the pieces for analysis. I have done a great deal more cutting than the lab so I have run into a few of these giant chondrules. They are neat. I will rerun here a photo that I have posted before online of one about 7-8 mm across.
It is a really neat polysomatic barred olivine chondrule that was exposed by cutting and photographed on the surface of a slice not in thin section. While most of the chondrules are small. The report in the Meteoritical Bulletin says 1-1 ½ millimeter chondrules are not infrequent. It adds a mention about 2 millimeter size chondrules being seen as well. But occasionally large slices have at least one of the much bigger chondrules. The meteorite has a scattering of metal grains and there are no spots where the metal appears to have rusted out of the stone. There is no heavy staining of the ground mass and no brown spots around the metal. The classifiers have said there is 1-2 % metal in the stone. There are veins of hematite or magnetite running through the rock and the very large chondrules are usually rimmed in black mineral. The official designation for this stone is NWA10816. There was a single mass which we bought and there is no information about any pairing that may exist with the many other NWA LL5s. This is a common situation
with NWA meteorites. We will just never know for sure where most were found or by whom. The single mass weighed 6980 grams. I have prepared some very nice pieces for our catalog of NWA10816. Just a few days after getting the results on NWA10816 we started to get some images from the lab on the third or our submissions. This stone was a single small stone that was very difficult to cut. I have dealt with friable stones before but this was way more crumbly than those. There was just no ground mass remaining in spots. The chondrules and small areas were simply floating in air mostly. As I cut the rock it fell apart into fragments. Cup shaped depressions were sometimes left behind when the chondrules fell out. It seemed as I was cutting that it was dissolving away into crumbs. Almost turning into a slurry of large fragments. I was to wonder later about a possible answer to this when the analysis was done. As I got a little deeper into the stone it got somewhat better. Clearly there was a thick rind on the outside of the stone that had weathered in a peculiar manner. The chondrules were medium size, well defined and colorful so my heart was breaking as the stone itself fell apart. I knew the meteorite was a low petrographic type. A type 3 or a 4 by the sharpness of the chondrules. As always I had my fingers crossed for a type 3, because I love them.
I took a couple large pieces from down inside which were holding together pretty well and sent them off. I thought there was something interesting and strange about the way it was weathering and that there was hardly any remaining metal. Later I was sent some images from Cascadia Meteorite Lab. One of which is shown below. The extensive amount of red in the image is calcium carbonate which has replaced the matrix of the meteorite. The light blue is iron oxide veins. I was told the image has one metal grain shown as the slightly darker blue. I can see one very small darker blue spot on the image I am not sure if that is the metal grain referred to or not. But the calcium replacement and iron oxide filling is fascinating. I am wondering now if the water coolant on the saw was not actually softening and dissolving the calcium carbonate adding to the crumbling of the stone. Though calcium carbonate should be quite resistant to the distilled or purified water I use.
I thought that it would receive a high weathering state and was a little surprised by the W3. But the stone does have portions with a light color and as it turns out between 5-10% of its original metal still remains. The report in the Meteoritical Bulletin describes the stone having void spaces and secondary replacement. The classifiers were able to get data from some of the olivine grains and determine the meteorite was an H chondrite. The chondrules appeared sharper than they truly were because of the way they were eroded out of the matrix. The stone presented some problems and to quote the classifier “The silicates are equilibrated, but the pyroxene is full of holes and inclusions, which will make getting the Fs content a bit tricky.� It was a type 4 which was still nice and in the range I thought originally. It is official with the designation NWA10828. Though most of the metal is gone from the stone it is still not as deeply rust stained as I would expect for one falling apart and with the ground mass replaced with caliche.
The center area of the single 541 gram stone may be easier to cut without crumbling as much. Though I do not know that for sure. The stone was broken in half and deeper down in the one half I cut it was better. The other larger half has not been touched yet and could be friable all the way through. I will have to find out. The surface I have to start with is still high fractured. I may try straight alcohol or cutting dry with my dust vacuum system on to prevent dissolving the calcium carbonate. Worth a try I think. We have kept all the fragments and got some larger pieces. We have them in our catalog. And I kept the smaller fragments and dust in a vial. Mixed in with the dust were small chondrules that fell out during cutting and handling. It is a pretty unique meteorite with the extensive calcium carbonate replacement surrounding many of the chondrules and the porous nature caused by all the void spaces.
Paul and I want to once again express our thanks to the staff at Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory for their efforts in classifying these two additional stones. Special thanks to Dr. Melinda Hutson and Dr. Alex Ruzicka. I am doing an ever increasing amount of cutting and who knows what I will find in the future. Maybe the very next stone will reveal something strange and unique. If is does than I may be sending another piece off for classification and analysis.
Meteorite Times Magazine Bob’s Bulletin – Vol. 2 No. 3 Robert Verish
Bob’s Bulletin – Vol. 2 No. 3 A newsletter for unclassified meteorites found in the USA.
In all of my previous Bob’s Bulletins, I explained the meaning of the phrase “orphaned-meteorites from the USA”. I defined these “orphans” as being unwitnessed-fall Ordinary Chondrite (OC) meteorite “finds” that are recovered in the U.S., but that the finders of these meteorites have found great difficulty in getting their finds documented, let alone getting them classified and then getting them an officially-approved name by the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society. Unfortunately, the vast majority of new U.S. finds are of this type. I went on to write that these “Unclassified U.S. finds” (UU) were being orphaned from the family of “approved” meteorites for the following reasons: 1) The lack of funding for U.S. researchers to authenticate, classify, and document/record these U.S. OC finds has resulted in several new [negative]; trends. 2) The increasing trend of commercializing the classifying of meteorites by U.S. researchers has priced U.S. OC finds out of the market, and 3) The increasing trend of U.S. researchers to turn away OC finds, even when finders of U.S. OC meteorites are willing to pay for their classification. This month’s edition of the “Newsletter” focuses on just the most recent US finds that I have had the priviledge to record. *** Note: None of the meteorites depicted in this month’s article were found by me. *** So, even though I may have taken the in-situ image, it doesn’t mean that I found that meteorite. Although I have personnal knowledge of, or have been informed about, many other recent U.S. finds, if I cannot personnally confirm their recovery data, then those meteorites won’t appear here in this “Bulletin”. And so, consider the meteorites depicted here to be just the tip of the iceberg. And there lies the problem. There continues to be a large number of U.S. meteorites being found, and the list of those going unreported is growing longer. This months finds, being relatively recent (and not being in my possession), I will forego the “Petrographic Description” until some time later. And since nearly all of the specimens are moderately-weathered externally, I will also forego the “Macroscopic Description” until later, as well. I hope the reader will enjoy the image gallery.
The following “Bulletin” is just one example of an alternative way in which to record U.S. OC meteorite finds that are going unreported (because of a lack of funding to classify U.S. meteorites [but there is funding for Antarctic meteorites], which leads to a lack of interest in OC finds by U.S. researchers). It is my hope that this compilation will bring attention to the problem of the increasing number of meteorites found here in the USA, not only going unclassified, but also going unrecorded. Hopefully, some volunteers will offer to help establish an on-line database that will document these “orphans”. Newsletter for Unclassified (a.k.a., Orphaned) Meteorites found in the USA – Volume 2 No. 3 — November 2016 Meteorite-Recovery Information Petrographic Descriptions Due to the pace of recovery of recent meteorite finds, this edition of the Newsletter is going to forego (until a later time) the publishing of “Recovery Information” and Petrographic Descriptions” that usually appears here. For now, what will appear here will be a gallery of images of the finds to include their in-situ photos. *** Note: All of the following meteorites in this month’s bulletin were found by one person (not the author) – all in one day. *** Image Gallery of Recently Found Meteorites: UU160428-14 UU160428-15 UU160428-16 UU160428-17 UU160428-18 UU160428-19 Gallery of Unclassified USA (UU) “Orphaned” Meteorite Images —
UU160428-14:
UU160428-15:
UU160428-16 – “pieces A thru C”:
UU160428-17:
UU160428-18:
UU160428-19:
The above “Bulletin” is just one example of a way in which to record U.S. Unclassified meteorite finds. Hopefully, this compilation will bring attention to the problem of the increasing number of meteorites found here in the USA, not only going unclassified, but even going unreported. Hopefully, some volunteers will offer to help establish a database that will document these “orphans”. In the meanwhile, I will do my part and continue to gather data, and along with others, make a list of what we know to be “orphaned meteorites”. References: Bob’s Bulletin – Vol. 1 No. 1 — In my first Bulletin, I introduced the phrase “orphaned-meteorites from the USA”. I defined these “orphans” as being unwitnessed-fall Ordinary Chondrite (OC) meteorite “finds” that are recovered in the U.S. Unfortunately, the vast majority of U.S. finds are of this type. I went on to write that these U.S. finds were being orphaned from the family of “approved” meteorites for the following reasons: 1) The lack of funding for U.S. researchers to authenticate, classify, and document/record these U.S. OC finds has resulted in several new [negative]; trends. 2) The increasing trend of commercializing the classifying of meteorites by U.S. researchers has priced U.S. OC finds out of the market, and 3) The increasing trend of U.S. researchers to turn away OC finds, even when finders of U.S. OC meteorites are willing to pay for their classification. Bob’s Bulletin – Vol. 1 No. 2 — In my 2nd Bulletin, I went into more detail about why I use the phrase “orphaned-meteorites from the USA”. I focused on the lack of U.S.-tax-dollar-funding and why no funding was going towards the classification of these particular meteorites. In hindsight, I now realize that I should have pointed-out that there is also a lack of funding for just authenticating and recording that a U.S. meteorite has been found. This function should never be confused with “classifying” a meteorite, which is obviously way more labor intensive and costly. Bob’s Bulletin – Vol. 1 No. 3 — In my 3rd Bulletin, I proposed the idea of an on-line database for these “orphaned” and other unclassified U.S. meteorites. This would have to be an all-volunteer effort, much in the same manner that the American Meteor Society has established the Fireball Reporting System. This database would give finders a central point to report their finds and have a field ID number issued to them.
This “Field ID” would reflect which US state and date of find. The function of this database should not be confused with already established processes of getting a meteorite “classified”, which is obviously way more labor intensive and costly. Bob’s Bulletin – Vol. 1 No. 4 — In my 4th Bulletin, I reported that several U.S. researchers were volunteering their time and effort to record and publish meteorite falls and finds, such as, Creston and Misfits Flat. I suggested that this method of cataloging newly found US meteorite specimens could be expanded, but the main hindrance is that there is no funding for this kind of effort. Bob’s Bulletin – Vol. 2 No. 1 — In my 5th Bulletin, I published a table of all the unclassified finds from Coyote Dry Lake DCA that were reported prior to 2007. Bob’s Bulletin – Vol. 2 No. 2 — In my 6th Bulletin, I published a table of the increasing number of unclassified U.S. meteorite finds and petitioned that crowd-sourced funding be used for volunteers to compile and record these finds for later classification and official-approval, until such time that this function can be properly funded with U.S tax-dollars. Meteoritical Bulletin: the search results for all provisional meteorites found in “USA” – Published by Meteoritical Society – Meteoritical Bulletin, Database. Meteorites of California the list of formally-recognized California meteorite falls and finds. My previous Bob’s Bulletins can be found *HERE* If you would like to sponsor any of these orphans, and help in the funding for getting them classified, in order to get them entered into the Meteoritical Bulletin Database, then please contact me by email: bolidechaser at yahoo-dot-com
Meteorite Times Magazine NWA 1685 LL4 Bessey’s BL John Kashuba
NWA 1685 LL4 is a handsome, interesting meteorite. Numerous stones were introduced in two releases by Dean Bessey and called BL. Individuals are glossy black on the outside and clearly brecciated on the inside. The brecciation is distinct because chondritic clasts differ in shock darkening, impact melt rock is featureless grey and many clasts are bounded by thin dark impact melt glass veins.
Thumbprinted, dark and glossy individuals of NWA 1685 LL4. One centimeter scale cube.
Cutting diagram for thin section maker. Note brecciated texture and fine grained clast at edge of portion to be sectioned. NWA 1685 LL4.
Thin section with a few features noted. Many more are apparent with magnification and attest to multiple impacts that darkened, crushed and melted this material. NWA 1685 LL4 in transmitted light.
Angular clasts at top of slide. This and all close-up photos below are with transmitted light and partially crossed polarizing filters, hereafter pxpl. This method seems to distinguish smaller textural features better than either plane polarized or xpl.
A light, angular, bell shaped clast bounded by a thin black vein (actually, a sheet) of melt glass. NWA 1685 LL4 pxpl.
Shock-darkened angular clast bounded by dark shock melt. NWA 1685 LL4 pxpl.
Somewhat rounded (or faceted) shock-darkened chondritic clast bounded by dark shock melt. NWA 1685 LL4 pxpl.
Rounded light-colored chondritic clast. NWA 1685 LL4 pxpl.
Rounded light-colored chondritic clast. NWA 1685 LL4 pxpl.
Fracture through a clast and chondrule with injected melt. NWA 1685 LL4 pxpl.
Grains of olivine in the fine-grained clast crystallized from impact melted rock, set in glass. The larger grains are probably the relict olivine grains mentioned by Phil McCausland. NWA 1685 LL4 pxpl.
Detail of olivine grains. NWA 1685 LL4 pxpl.
NWA 869 L3-6 is also known for its fine-grained impact melt rock inclusions. Analysis by Metzler and others found that some are simply melted parent material (minus volatiles) and some contain a foreign component, presumed to be an impactor.
Fine-grained olivine in impact melt clast. Note crack with terrestrial weathering products. NWA 869 L3-6 pxpl.
Detail of olivine grains and crack. NWA 869 L3-6 pxpl.
Norm’s Tektite Teasers: A New Sort of Australasian Tektite Teardrop By Norm Lehrman (www.TektiteSource.com) There is a class of Indochinite teardrops that are commonly termed “Hershey’s Kisses” out of morphological similarities to their namesake. Some of these exhibit most unusual twisted tails, and this was to be an article about “twisters”, but I learned something unexpected along the way.
There is power in numbers, and as I gathered a broad selection of our Hershey’s Kiss tektites, I saw a rather constant theme. These are not teardrops as usual: there is something else going on here!
The tektite teardrop party line has always been that teardrops form when blobs of molten glass get a bit off-centered and extend into dumbbells spinning like airplane propellers, neck down in the middle, and ultimately part. I do believe this to be correct most of the time. But Hershey’s kisses are different. They constitute a special kind of their own on the basis of four criteria that I recognize: 1) 2) 3) 4)
They have a distinctly bulbous, squat, pear-shaped, or even a flattened “puddle” profile. They have a very consistent tail curvature. (See above image). Their frontal surface shows deep beaded pitting and thermal spallation scars. Nearly all show a variably developed skin lineation, like stretched or twisted taffy.
We have many hundreds of teardrops in our inventory. These are different. We don’t have any teardrops (other than those with the Hershey’s Kiss morphology) that show twists near their tails. We don’t have any dumbbells that show a twisted waistline, which would be a necessary precursor stage to an origin by necking and parting of a dumbbell.
The Hershey’s Kiss teardrops give the appearance of having formed in a very fluid state. The story that best fits our observations is that these originated in a very high temperature regime of the parent impact event. I envision blobular spheroids of liquid glass subjected to high velocity propulsion in a white-hot environment. Velocities were sufficiently high that the frontal surfaces of the projectiles built a leading face cushion of highly compressed air that variably flattened the nose. Pressure-shadow vacuum vortices formed in the rear. The still highly liquid glass was drawn into the tail vortex (with a profile likely related to projectile velocity), giving rise to long mathematically perfect tail forms. I further imagine that the airflow bordering the pressure shadow was in the form of a vortex. In this view, the skin lineations may well be low amplitude wrinkles resulting from frictional drag and deformation of a thin surface layer, although thermal erosion may also play a role (more on this later). Interestingly, about half of our specimens show relatively straight longitudinal lineations. The other half are “twisters”, about evenly divided between clockwise and counter-clockwise spirals.
Thermal Ablation These Hershey’s Kiss teardrops share a nearly universal frontal surface character which only revealed itself to me after inspecting over 50 of our best examples. Typically, the flattened nose is mostly bald, with patches that are deeply pitted with hemispherical cupules and/or grooves.
Often the shoulders have deep longitudinal gutters which open out into the tail region as if they were channels where airflow escaped from the compressed frontal cushion, jetting like a blowtorch around the edges into the pressure shadow vacuum. I consider these gutters to be thermal erosion channels. The tailward end of these gutters often serve as points or regions of origin for the skin lineations. In some cases, branching “tributaries” in the spill-over region coalesce to form more pronounced lineations in the tail section. But the surprise came on closer inspection of the bald areas. Flake detachment scars are clear. These stones are not “bald”, they are ablated! These teardrops are a previously unrecognized type of thermal ablation core, quite like Australite ablation cores. Spallation is a consequence of thermal differential. In the case of Australites, they came in icy cold, but the friction of atmospheric entry rapidly heated the frontal surface to incandescent temperatures. Simple expansion exfoliated wafer-thin spalls, such that the frontal surface of a well-developed core is ultimately devoid of any primary external skin. The proposition that Hershey’s Kisses are thermal ablation cores raises an interesting question: this is the other end of the strewn field from Australites, so what is the explanation here? The spallation indicates temperature differential, a contrast in expansion and contraction. A frontal cushion of highly compressed air would have helped to maintain elevated temperatures in the underlying region of the tektite, while airflow around the flanks and tail would result in cooling and relative contraction. The bulbous distentional deformation of the nose would further encourage thin skin flakes to pop loose.
These “Hershey’s Kisses” are something special. They are nearly primary teardrops. The true primary forms were oscillating sub-spherical blobs of highly fluid glass battered by compressed air and stretched out in pressure shadow vortices. Our specimens are mostly from Guandong Province of China, with a smaller number sourced from the Khorat Plateau, Thailand.
Meteorite Times Magazine SPACE ROCKS MAGAZINE Paul Harris
After much thought I have decided to publish a new quarterly magazine about hunting, collecting, and the science of rocks from outer space. I will not be accepting yearly subscription payments, only payments as each individual issue is published and ready to mail out to the subscribers. If you have any questions please send me a private message or contact me using the email listed below. Your support is what will make this magazine a success for us all in the meteorite community. Regards, Michael Johnson Editor-in-Chief, Space Rocks Magazine
August 2016 issue of SPACE ROCKS MAGAZINE Click Magazine To Purchase
Please submit your article with photos to: spacerocksmagazine@gmail.com
Meteorite Times Magazine Wabar Paul Harris
Our Meteorite of the Month is kindly provided by Tucson Meteorites who hosts The Meteorite Picture of the Day.
Suzanne Morrison, IMCA 5146. Suzanne writes: This is a highly weathered, to the point of shale, iron meteorite from the Wabar Craters in Saudi Arabia. It has an incredible ‘popped’ appearance, like it has been exploded out along planes. I had a great conversation with a crater expert and he explained iron meteorites during a crater forming event are subjected to such immense pressures and temperatures, it is possible to ‘weather’ the meteorite fragments upon impact. This causes, in moments, what is typically seen after many, many years of being subjected to terrestrial weathering. This piece came out of the collection of a gentleman who made multiple trips to the Wabar Craters in the 1990s. Submit Pictures to Meteorite Pictures of the Day
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Once a few decades ago this opening was a framed window in the wall of H. H. Nininger's Home and Museum building. From this window he must have many times pondered the mysteries of Meteor Crater seen in the distance. Photo by Š 2010 James Tobin