5/8/2023 0 Comments Campo del cielo meteorite![]() That seemed plausible – it didn’t look like any meteorite I’d seen pictures of, so I assumed the chance that it was a fake was high. I don’t know who I was talking to afterward, but someone looked at the meteorite and commented that it would be easy to fake with a bit of iron slag. I remember so clearly because I almost instantly regretted it. I vividly remember how much I paid for it: $80. I didn’t know any of that at the time I got the meteorite at the auction. The resulting strewn field is 2 miles wide, more than 11 miles long, and includes at least 26 craters with diameters of up to 100 meters the impact of the fragment that produced the 100-meter crater would itself have been multi-kiloton event. The Campo del Cielo meteor was probably more like 50m in diameter, so it would have been a multi-megaton explosion in the upper atmosphere. The Chelyabinsk meteor is estimated to have been 20m in diameter, and it produced an airburst of approximately 500 kilotons. The original Campo del Cielo meteor exploded in the atmosphere, much like the Chelyabinsk meteor over Russia in 2013, but on a much grander scale. It was clearly marked as a chunk of Campo del Cielo, which fell over northwest Argentina four or five thousand years ago. The meteorite came with a little drawstring bag made of red felt, and a certificate of authenticity. I don’t remember the year – early 2000s for sure. I picked this up probably 15 years ago at an auction at a Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting. Following the universal standard for meteorite photography, the scale cube in the photos is 1cm. It’s about the size of the last joint of your index finger. This is the first meteorite I ever owned, a 40g piece of Campo del Cielo from Argentina. It’s not a large collection, just a handful of things I’ve picked up, but each is satisfying in its own way. We then set each resulting fragment as a very handsome pendant on a silver-plated chain in our Walton, NY fabrication studio. Only about 5% of meteorites are composed of iron! Material of this sort and source is rare, and highly collectible.My recent talk on impacts and the end-Cretaceous extinctions reminded me that I’ve never posted about my meteorite collection. Each piece is then struck with great force and shattered along those fault lines into fragments, each with a unique shape. Larger pieces of the meteorites are repeatedly heated in hot water to temperatures above 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and cooled in liquid nitrogen to temperatures below -300 degrees Fahrenheit, in order to weaken them along natural fault lines formed in the undisturbed void of outer space over billions of years. Scientists believe that, like other iron meteorites, the Campo del Cielo mass probably originated within the Asteroid Belt located between Mars and Jupiter. The total weight of the pieces recovered so far from Campo del Cielo exceeds 100 tons, making the meteorite the heaviest one ever recorded on Earth. These craters were first “discovered” by a Spanish military expedition in 1576 they were, however, already known to the aboriginal inhabitants of the area. The craters are estimated to be between 4,000 and 5,000 years old. The crater field covers an area of approximately 35 square miles, and contains at least 26 craters (the largest being a little more than 6 square miles around). The Campo del Cielo refers to a group of iron meteorites, and to the area where they were found, 620 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, Argentina. ![]()
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