“My dad is a meme,” This is a lovely opener for a very fun conversation. After this I usually pull out my phone and show this picture to whomever I am speaking to. “This is my dad, and that is a meteorite… My parents sell meteorites for a living.” The most frequent response I get from friends is, “So your dad is an actual space cowboy?” to which I respond with a nod.
There are then comparisons to Minecraft Glowstone, Pokemon, and a few other Video game references, if the person I am talking to is a comic book or superhero fan they are bound to say something like, “that’s how you become a superhero.” This is all pretty standard. I grew up with the rare being the mundane. Meteorites were a piece of my home life pretty much since birth.
This meteorite though, this one is special. It’s called the Fukang, and came from China. The classification is Stony Iron-Pallasite.
The beautiful glow that makes it so much resemble the Minecraft blocks are olivine crystals. Olivine is another name for the gemstone Peridot, the birthstone for the month of August, and when back lit they are translucent and, as can be seen, stunning.
The pieces between, the matrix, holding these cosmic gems in place is made up of iron and nickel. This slice displays a very important indicator of extra-terrestrial origin, known as the widmanstatten pattern. This pattern, made visible by etching, can only be formed by iron and nickel cooling very slowly in a zero gravity environment, this allows the metals to crystalize, and is unable to be replicated here on earth.
This slice is a cross section of a spectacularly large meteorite originally weighing around 1 ton. It is speculated that a meteorite like this is the result of the break up of a very small planetoid’s core mantle boundary.
There are other pallasites out there, however, the size and clarity of the crystals in the Fukang are one of the things that make it unique. This material is extremely rare. More rare than gold or diamonds.
The size of this slice makes it exceptional. The training and experience required to cut and prepare a slice of this size is highly specialized, and this slice has been prepared expertly by one of the few people in the world with that expertise. Even for a person surrounded by meteorites day in and day out for much of my life the Fukang slices still cause me to stare in wonder. They are truly one of a kind.
More about the Fukang Meteorite