Meteorite or Meteorwrong Options

[Woody]

Some odd finds,

A buddy asked me to help him identify some hefty rock samples he was finding. He said they were full of metal and kind of resembled what one might think of as being a meteorite. This intrigued me and I headed over to check out his finds. Upon viewing them I was 95% certain they were not meteorites and was about 75% certain they were slag of some sorts. However I could not give a definitive answer one way or the other and I could not rule out with 100% certainty they were not a naturally occurring rock. We went to the local creek where quickly we found several other specimens, again a suggestive indicator they were slag.
Often the easiest way to determine what an item is, is by proving what it is not. So I tried the Meteorite or Meteorwrong test. “Credit Utah’s Department of Natural Resources Geological Survey and other on-line resources”.
“Many different types of meteorites, this material would best fit the Stony-Iron type.”
1. Does the rock have a fusion crust? “Fusion Crust can be dark brown to fresh black, and glassy”. Answer- Yes, there are several areas that could be called fusion crust.
2. Is the rock magnetic? Iron meteorites strongly attract a magnet, stony meteorites have a slight attraction. Answer- Yes magnetic.
3. Does the rock have native iron? Native iron is shiny metal bright and looks like untarnished silver when it is exposed. Native iron is extremely rare in natural earth rocks. Answer- Yes there is metal showing and if I had to describe it I would use the words, “looks like Silver”.
4. Does the rock feel heavy compared to other rocks about the same size? Stony meteorites usually have a density from 3 to 4 times the density of fresh water. Answer- Yes it is much heavier than water.
5. Does the rock pass the window test. Cut a small window to see inside. Meteorites are tough, so you may need some elbow grease and lots of patience here! Wipe off the dust from the ground-off area and look inside the rock. A plain and featureless texture suggests that it's just another Earthly meteor-wrong, but if you can see small, bright flakes of shiny metal mixed within the stone, it probably is a meteorite. Answer- yes I see three metallic flakes in the small window I made.
6. Does your rock have bubble holes (vesicles)? Most meteorites don't have vesicles. Answer- Yes there is some holes in the material.
7. Does the rock have a streak? Test for streak by rubbing the rock on unglazed porcelain such as the back of a tile. If it leaves a streak, it probably isn't a meteorite. Answer- Well kind of, some of it will and some of it will not.
So two of the seven tests fail, there is bubbles and it will leave a streak, again probably not extra-terrestrial. Had me worried there for a couple of minutes. They are probably some sort of high grade slag. A by-product of the early mining days here in Colorado Springs. I can’t say why they have iron and metal showing but maybe the process used in those days were not as efficient as one might think. So sorry Chris B, I don’t believe they are meteorites but it is possible they could contain high grade ore of some sort.

All in all we found around 10 items. Some were about the size of a small microwave and too heavy to carry. As I cut into the material I was surprised to see the characteristics. There was little to no granular structure and it could be describes as being kind of resinous. It would not cut easy with a dermal cutting wheel. It kind of “chunked” off like it was brittle but it was not. Not what a person would think of as being slag.

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[Woody]

Here in the first picture you can see that some of the surface metal resembled silver. The last picture is of the small window I cut. You can clearly see two metal flecks, there is a third in the bottom of the window but it is hard to see from this angle. These samples looked good for possible meteorites but the gas bubbles meant they were terrestrial and not extra-terrestial.

Hope this might help someone out there wondering if they have a possible meteorite. If you have a specimen that passes all seven test listed then you would want to order a Nickel Identification Test. All meteorites iron meteorites have some nickel and there is a kit you can buy on-line to identify this.

Have a good one, Woody.

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[Crusty]

Interesting! I'd be pretty excited by the time I got through the first several and checked yes... only to be shot down in the end! lol

[Coalbunny]

Take the ones in question to a rock saw and cut off a piece. Then etch it with nitric acid. If you see a unique crystal structure in the etching, then you may have something.

I found a couple nice pieces and I swear they look like meteorites to me.

[ASTROBLEME]

Woody was kind enough to let me take a slice out of one of the samples. There was just too much iron present to discard these specimens without taking a closer look. As the photos show, the sample is filled with vesicles and the iron is presented as blobs and spheres. Most likely this is a man made meteorwrong.

It was very interesting to see that the iron was "rusting" deep inside the specimen. This is a fine example of how fast an iron meteorite can be destroyed by weathering, especially in a wet or humid environment.






ASTROBLEME

[Woody]

Thanks Johnny for letting me pick your brain and definitively putting this one to bed. We were all pretty certain that is was slag but cutting it was the only way to know for sure. It was good to meet you and I look forward to future endeavors as well. Good luck with your current activities. Woody

[Snowball Solar S...]

[quote name='Woody' date='Aug 2 2013, 10:21 PM' post='29013']
Some odd finds,

I think the scientific community is overly cautious and unimaginative in assuming all slag is man made. I've analyzed iron furnace slag from several sources here in Southeast Pennsylvania, and all require magnification to see micron-sized metallic-iron spherules in thin glassy chip sections with strong back lighting, whereas these metallic-iron blebs appear to be centimeter sized. Only a catastrophic event could trap metallic-iron droplets of this size against an almost 3:1 density differential.

Here in SE PA, I think I can trace this similar meteorwrong material to two round impact quarries, one next to Harrisburg, PA in Swatara Township and one in Conshohocken, PA, which were likely excavated for their iron-ore content. Both quarry impact craters are in limestone terrain may be necessary to 'flux' metallic iron into macroscopic-sized droplets.

My understanding is that the End Pleistocene extinction event, circa 13,100 years ago, that may have formed the 450 km Dia Nastapoka arc in southern Hudson Bay, and fragments from this comet may be responsible for silicides- and metallic-iron-type meteorwrongs. Carbon monoxide in comet ice may chemically reduce iron oxide in comet dust into metallic iron in the presence of limestone target rock, replicating the conditions found in pig-iron blast furnace, but at much higher pressure. Then the almost as sudden pressure collapse following the impact shock wave expands the basaltic melt, catastrophically freezing the metallic-iron droplets in place.

The material has no value due to the likely millions/billions of tons of the stuff lying around, so I hope you'll be good enough to reveal the location of the find to advance the science and possibly even locate the impact-crater/quarry on Google Terrain.

https://plus.google.com/photos/106045608115...0705?banner=pwa

https://plus.google.com/photos/106045608115...0737?banner=pwa

https://plus.google.com/photos/106045608115...3377?banner=pwa

https://plus.google.com/photos/106045608115...2865?banner=pwa

My Google+ Account:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/106045608115852817529/posts

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[ASTROBLEME]

Snowball,

I agree that many academics are locked into assumptions that yield incorrect results when making determinations on unusual samples. It is always best to follow through with high precision iron isotope analysis. Do you have any isotope data on the iron furnace slags you've examined that you'd be willing to share? I have ICPMS isotopes for a 270 gram "suspected meteorite" shown in the photos below that I would be willing to provide. The lower photo shows the cut surface of the "suspected meteorite" against the likely slag sample I cut from Woody. I did not run the likely slag specimen due to the large vesicles and location of the find being close to a smelter operation. The suspected meteorite was collected by a ranch owner from his well traveled dirt driveway...soon after a large fireball passed right over that area. The fireball report is well documented and can be viewed here...

Cloudbait Fireball

By the way, I was told that the "suspected meteorite" was only slag by a well known meteorite scientist that looked at the pics and the ICPMS reports, so it would be interesting to compare this to data from Pennsylvania.

ASTROBLEME

[russau]

about maybe 10 years ago,a friend said his friend found a metorite in his feild that he was currently plowing.as he drives/plows the rows he keeps looking down because he usually finds indian artifacts as he turns the soil. well this time he sees a black object laying directly on top of the newly turned soil from the last pass..........hes thinking WOW i could have been hit on the head.he stopped and picked it up and there wasnt any soil staining on it, meaning it just landed.well i talked them into bring it to work and had the minerologists slice a small corner and polish it. then i took it over to the guy that had the big machine that ids minerals (i forgot the name of it!)EDS???? or something like that. well it turns out that it wasnt a metorit at all but a peice of melted copper that fell from the sky. probly a melted peice of a space craft. but i gave all of this back to the owner with color pictures and the id read out of the specimen.but it was a very unique peice and a conversation peice at that!

[Snowball Solar S...]

It's taken more than 6 years of stumbling around and a paradigm shift in geology and solar-system mechanics to gradually spiral in on my current understanding, and no, it can't possibly be industrial slag with the size of the metallic-iron inclusions which preclude its cooling from a molten state on the surface of a high-gravity planet.

Mass spec analysis shows siderophile-element depletion (low nickel, no iridium down to 2 ppb) which is the exact opposite of differentiated asteroid and undifferentiated chondrite meteorites in this particular type of 'meteorwrong'.

Believe it or not, here's my understanding:

Our former brown-dwarf Companion spiraled-in and merged 542 million years ago in an explosion that, kicked off the Cambrian Explosion of life and ushered in the Phanerozoic Eon, perhaps seeding icy planetesimals, moons and planets with brown-dwarf panspermia, including, perhaps, (most) all the kingdoms and phyla which rapidly grew in size and differentiated on lower-gravity bodies with salt-water oceans and rocky cores. And the asymmetrical spiral-in merger gave our Companion escape velocity from the Sun, but its effects may still be seen in the similar argument of perihelion of extended scattered disk (ESD) objects like Sedna and 2012 VP113 and the former synchronous orbit of Venus whose rotation became slightly retrograde after the loss of the centrifugal force of the Sun around our former solar system barycenter (the conservation of energy and angular momentum thing).

Planets and brown dwarfs may have iron cores which sequester their siderophile elements. In a binary spiral-in merger, core material may escape in polar jets, but polar jets have less energy than the more vigorous equatorial explosion, so siderophile elements were largely confined behind the Companion's gravitational force field, known as its Roche sphere. The mantle material (which contained considerable iron) escaped the Companion's Roche sphere to be captured by the Sun to form a secondary debris disk which may or may not have condensed planetesimals, but apparently coated trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) with highly chemically reduced debris-ring dust.

Violent chemical reactions between highly-chemically-reduced debris dust and highly-oxidized TNOs frequently reached the melting point, forming pillow lava containing metallic-iron inclusions which I call 'TNO-crust', and indeed some TNO-crust has one smooth, curved outer surface, with the other surfaces being fractured.

Continental tectonic plates:
The basement rock of Earth's tectonic plates is composed of aqueously-differentiated planetesimal cores delivered in extinction event impacts. The central swath of the United States was already on Earth prior to the 1250-980 Ma Grenville orogeny, but the Appalachian dwarf planet and the North American cordillera dwarf planet were still growing by hybrid accretion of smaller planetesimals in the Kuiper-belt/scattered-disc where they became coated by the debris disk and incorporated TNO-crust into Cambrian rock formations, typically carbonate rock formations (limestone, marble and dolostone) which often forms the 'frosting' on top of aqueously-differentiated planetesimal cores.

The Appalachian dwarf planet splashed down at around 443.4 Ma causing the Ordovician–Silurian extinction event, and the North American cordillera dwarf planet splashed down at 66 Ma, causing the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. (The Chicxulub crater was a vastly-smaller secondary hit around the same time.)

Extraordinary disruptions of the Oort cloud et al. are due to intermittent close encounters with disk-crossing halo orbits of invisible, cold dark matter (CDM) gravitationally-bound (Bok) globules, composed of 10s to a few 100s of solar masses of hydrogen and helium, with sizes ranging from 1/2 to 1 light year across. Bok globules of the halos have their (luminous) stellar metallicity condensed (sequestered) into icy chondrules, such that the gaseous molecular hydrogen and helium is virtually invisible; however, Bok globules can be trapped by giant molecular clouds in the warmer disk plane where the most volatile components of the icy chondrules sublime, rendering them opaque and thus visible, and gaseous stellar metallicity reduces the speed of sound, promoting Jeans instability, forming stars.

There's enough TNO-crust on Earth alone to build the Great Wall of China, and since there's monetary value to consider, perhaps you will be good enough to say where you found the material, which I suspect to have eroded out of carbonate rock of Cambrian or Ordovician age, somewhere in the Appalachians.

https://plus.google.com/1060456081158528175...sts/XJiFejDV6vG

https://plus.google.com/1060456081158528175...sts/LDbjQWJ2qjD

Email address:

[Denise]

Great information and pictures, thanks for posting it up for us!

[Woody]

Thats very interesting information Snowball,

Kind of hard keeping up with you as you were running along but I get the jist. I do agree this material sure looks interesting but I don't think your theory will hold true for this one. All specimens were found in close association with sedimentary rock. No Igneous to speak of within miles. The area they come from was only a couple of miles or so from a large ore smelting plant back in 1800"s. This plants primary function seemed to be precious metals. Likely they had a large volume of low-grade material that was not profitable at the time. That would be my guess and the research done by ASTROBLEME and his associates seem to fit the bill as well. The one thing your theory did not cover was the large vesicles which is the main characteristic keeping it from being a Meteorite. How do you purpose we move past that? If you can come up with an acceptable explanation for such a large disqualifier I will mail you a sample that is yours to keep. Woody

[EMac]

Fascinating discussion; many thanks to all of you.

[Snowball Solar S...]

Respectfully,

I suggest Early Cambrian carbonate (sedimentary) rock as the source rock (limestone, dolostone or marble), not igneous rock. The melting of the brown-dwarf coating occurred 542 millioin years ago in the coating on the surface of extraterrestrial plaentesimals from the Kuiper-belt/scattered-disk which sank onto the sedimentary planetesimal core under a salt-water ocean. The dwarf planet collided with Earth 443 Ma, causing the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event. and contributing (Appalachian) dwarf-planet core rock to the continental tectonic plates.

As the ideology goes, the Appalachian basement rock you're standing on are the aqueously-differentiated dwarf planet core, complete with brown-dwarf material in pockets of Early Cambrian carbonate rock.

A binary merger of a former Companion to the Sun is quite a stretch, but for the very first time in the 6-7 years I've been on this, the train of logic explains everything I'm seeing here in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Coordinates of find locations in Southeastern PA:

Plymouth, PA
40.080893, -75.312770

Phoenixville, PA
40.134763, -75.513609

3595 Doe Run Church Rd
Coatesville, PA 19320
39.929497, -75.809780

2101-2199 Sycamore St
Harrisburg, PA 17111
40.254694, -76.850742

The easiest way to get coordinates is to bring up the area on Google maps, point to the location, right click, and select "What's here?". Are you willing to share your coordinates?

https://hillscloud.wordpress.com/trans-nept...meteorwrongs-2/

[ASTROBLEME]

If you collect a specimen with visible metal inclusions, they should have random sizes and shapes. If you’re looking at something that has numerous droplets or spheres of metal in it, it probably isn't a meteorite but likely is a man-made material.

Here's a pic of the bright white metal in a specimen I collected from the Westcliffe Crater. The size and shape of the metal inclusions and the chondrule should be visible under a magnifying glass or jeweler’s loupe. Hope this helps to avoid confusion over weathered smelter materials that are commonly mistaken for meteorites.