Complete Slice Of Brenham Meteorite — An American Pallasite

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Complete Slice Of Brenham Meteorite — An American Pallasite

Kiowa County, Kansas, USA (37° 34' 57"N, 99° 9' 49" W)

Overall size 18.5 x 12.8 x 0.3 cm. The slice polished on both sides to reveal the dense concentration of translucent to transparent brownish yellow to yellow green olivine crystals within the highly lustrous nickel-iron. With custom lucite base.

Associated with the Haviland crater in in Kiowa County, Kansas, the Brenham meteorite was “discovered” in 1882 by Eliza Kimberly, a local farmer, who collected numerous samples and convinced Professor F.W. Cragin of Washburn College in Kansas so come inspect them. The true discoverers of the the meteorites were the Native American peoples of the region, for whom the meteorites were the primary source of iron; jewelry fashioned from the meteorites has been found in Native American burial mounds as far away as Ohio. At only 50 feet in diameter, the Brenham Crater is one of the smallest impact craters in the world.

The crystals seen here are the result of small chunks of the stony mantle becoming suspended in the molten metal of an asteroid’s iron-nickel core. Cut and polished, the lustrous metallic matrix features silicate crystals of gleaming olivine and peridot (gem-quality olivine) ranging in hues from emerald to amber. The metallic latticework in which the gemstones are set is referred to as a Widmanstätten pattern. It is the result of a slow cooling that provided sufficient time — millions of years — for the two metallic alloys to orient into their crystalline habit. As the only place where this can happen is in the vacuum of space (and also, theoretically at Earth’s own core-mantle boundary), the appearance of this pattern is diagnostic in the identification of a meteorite.