In 2004 there was a new expedition to the Seymchan location where several. It was originally classified as a coarse octahedrite with a bandwidth of 2.0mm, Iron IIE. The Seymchan meteorite as originally found in 1967 near the to the town of its namesake Seymchan in far East Russia. The museum bought the meteorite chunk with money from its Louise Hawley Stone Fund and from the Ontario Ministry of Heritage. This is a wonderful etched thick end slice of Seymchan meteorite. One thing that's special about the meteorite is the fact that the olivine and iron are found together, something that never occurs on Earth, Tait said. The new slices will allow for larger-scale studies impossible with those earlier pieces, such as determining the size and spacing of individual grains.
The 1931 pieces of the Springwater meteorite were mostly cut into small pieces and distributed to museums around the world, Tait said. The slice will eventually be put on display in the museum's Vale Inco Limited Gallery of Minerals.Īnother slice is being cut for research purposes. "Having something that large survive through the atmosphere is very rare," Tait said. The 52.8-kilogram chunk - the biggest piece of a pallasite ever found in Canada - was recovered by a meteorite hunter who combed through the site again with an ATV and modern metal detectors in 2009. It is believed to have originated from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Three smaller pieces of the ROM's meteorite were originally found in a farmer's field near Springwater, Sask., in 1931. Of the 35,000 meteorites found on Earth, only 84 have been pallasites, and only three of them have been found in Canada. The Springwater meteorite is a rare kind known as a pallasite, from deep inside a large, planet-like asteroid with an iron core. "So they're fundamental to our understanding of how the solar system did form." "They show us features and textures of things that we don't see anywhere else anymore," he said. Ian Nicklin, an earth sciences technician at the museum, likened meteorites to "little time capsules." Tait hopes the rare, 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite will help researchers learn more about the early universe, the formation of the minerals inside asteroids, and about the similar minerals deep inside the Earth, at the boundary between its iron core and its outer mantle. "It's like Christmas," she later said of her first glimpse inside the precious rock purchased by the museum in recent weeks. Kimberly Tait, the museum's associate curator of mineralogy, pried the piece away from the main chunk - a grey rock covered in slightly rusty, brown patches - to reveal interconnected, translucent greenish spots of a silicate mineral called olivine mottled through a grey iron-nickel alloy.
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