Can neither prove nor disprove. Opinions?

[Tuberale]

Received from GoodyGuy earlier this month. Found in Ohio.

Have tried to file a "window" into the core of the rock using a carbon-steel file. Spent about 20 minutes doing this by hand: stone barely shows any results. Posting the photos I have to let others see. Stone is obviously harder than most rock.

Stone weighs about 1 pound, is mostly black exterior. Had a lot of dirt and sand on it when I first received it. Scrubbed the surface with a toothbrush under water, which turned the water muddy and brownish.

In bright sunlight, the "window" gleams brightly. Otherwise, it looks dull gray. It does not have the appearance of either iron or iron ore (hematite), which a carbon-steel file should have ground fairly quickly.

Aareas of the stone appear molten or flowed.

I do not see regmaglympts. The stone does have many small depressions of irregular shape on the surface.

Stone is weakly magnetic when tested with a kitchen magnet: about half the attraction of the same magnet to steel.

It has a whitish blob about 4mm x 2.5mm near one of the areas which looks like it has been melted at one time. White is not a good color to find on a meteorite.

I'm wondering if this might be a chondrite or stony-iron meteorite?

 

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[distimpson]

hello Tuberale, cant say anything definite from a picture, my guess is slag, a lot of people bring various types in the museum for id. try a nickel test? find someone with lapidary equipment to help you polish a window, should be easy with the right tools.

don stimpson
kansas meteorite museum & nature center
Haviland, Kansas 67059
http://www.kansasmeteorite.com

 

[Tuberale]

hello Tuberale, cant say anything definite from a picture, my guess is slag, a lot of people bring various types in the museum for id. try a nickel test? find someone with lapidary equipment to help you polish a window, should be easy with the right tools.

don stimpson
kansas meteorite museum & nature center
Haviland, Kansas 67059
http://www.kansasmeteorite.com

Will probably take it downtown to PSU Meteorite Lab. Should be quick place to get a nickel test done. Heck, if I had the chemicals, I'd do it myself: still remember that much from Chemistry 103.

Have been trying to get access to my neighbor's grinding wheel to erode a window into this faster. My carbon-steel file doesn't seem to want to make much of a window in it. The exposed area doesn't really look like iron to me: more some other kind of hard metal. It sets a detector off real fast. But I'm leery because the magnet test isn't nearly dramatic enough. So I'm thinking a stony iron, maybe. Also has at least 3 different white inclusion on the outside of the stone: quite small. Can't tell whether they are limestone particles from impact or not. Specimen was found in a creek bed, and "didn't look right". Only interior lines I can see were probably from the file, rather than Widmanstatten. On my postal scale, specimen weighs nearly a pound, so in the 460-480 gram range: quite a bit larger than I anticipated.

Also have been working on a historic fall here in Oregon. Impact was felt 40 miles away, and caused a forest fire during a drenching Oregon rainstorm. Said by an early historian to have vaporized a 20-foot-deep logging pond, as well as either tossing or burning completely the logs that were in the pond. First people back to the pond dug down into the dry bottom, and found what they called "a mass of lava" 23 feet across. Dick Pugh think that would be completely impossible. I'm not so certain, given to the conditions it fell at and through. No fatalities because the mill had already shut down for the weekend, and the mill was 8 miles from the nearest community, but mostly separated from it by a fairly high ridge. If it fell, it would be truly a monster. Even have the date and time of the fall, but no one has removed it (I wonder why <G>). One other telling point on this one: when the pioneers hit the rock at the bottom of the pond "it rang like a bell." Since it hit long before the Willamette Meteorite was discovered, it might have been the reason Ellis Hughes suggested meteorite when he struck the Willamette with a rock. Special conditions for this rock: fell in what is now an estuary, and quite likely the pond silted in afterwards. Water level was controlled by flood gates at time of impact, and the impact apparently destroyed the flood gates, as well as starting the forest fire. With nothing to hold back the water, stone might well be under 10-15 feet of sand and mud now. And how the heck would anyone be able to list a meteorite with a diameter of 23 feet?

 

[mamabear]

wouldn't something that big cause a HUGE impact that would be felt at massive distance? perhaps if it was a meteorite, it was of smaller size & happened to hit one of Willamette's erratics? can't imagine one that big not being noticed by seismographic equipment?

 

[Tuberale]

wouldn't something that big cause a HUGE impact that would be felt at massive distance? perhaps if it was a meteorite, it was of smaller size & happened to hit one of Willamette's erratics? can't imagine one that big not being noticed by seismographic equipment?

At time of impact, I don't believe seismic detectors were in the area. Possibly not even on the west coast, since it would have been prior to big San Francisco earthquake, too.

All I can be certain of are what was reported in the newspapers of the time, preserved at the Oregon Historical Society in various scrapbooks. Fall in the vicinity of Coos Bay, impact was heard (may also have been felt) at either Reedsport (30 miles north) or Florence (40-50 miles north): haven't looked at this recently, so can't state positively.

Willamette Valley's glacial erratics were ferried into the Willamette Valley in icebergs from the Lake Missoula floods (aka Bretz floods) some 12,000-18,000 years ago. Coos Bay is over 100 miles from the Willamette Valley.

 

[Tuberale]

More photos of a new window I ground into the stone. Window appears quite reflective in bright sunlight, but merely dull gray if not in direct sunlight. Window is approximately the center of both photos.

 

[Tuberale]

Saw Dick Pugh tonight at the Mission Theatre where he talked about meteorites. Handed him the stone and began catching up with Maggie Rogers. It was wonderful to see Maggie outside of her milieu of the Oregon Mycological Society.

Shortly Dick returned, and pronounced the stone ... a piece of iron slag from a foundry, probably old. Once I compared one of Dick's sample meteorites with this stone, knew it was a long shot: too light. What I thought might be flow lines were called glass by Dick, which also accounted for the lack of magnetism, poor metallic content, and comparative lightness of being.

What to say at this terrible let-down than to quote the immortal lines from the band Queen: "...And another one bites the dust."

 

[TerryC]

Ah, the infamous meteorwrong! I took a suspect rock to the guys at NASA, where I worked. They could barely cut it with the "plasma cutter" machine. They put it on another machine that registers the atomic componants. They then declared it almost pure chromium SLAG! Ouch! .... next time...... TTC

 

[jrandy]

It looks to be slag from a steel plant . I have found the same rocks mostly along railroad tracks. I have many true meteorites aand I do a nickel test on them. You can buy a test kit on ebay for about 20.00, it is well worth it. Also if it passes that you can send it to Arizona State for testing .It takes months but they will do it for free.