[meteorite-list] More about beautiful Lahoma

From: bernd.pauli_at_paulinet.de <bernd.pauli_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Aug 3 17:26:14 2006
Message-ID: <DIIE.0000005400000A0D_at_paulinet.de>

Hello Mark B., M.C., and List,

My three Lahoma slices arrived today and what shall I say, ... they are
out of this world! Beautiful shades of green, delicate shock veinlets,
abundant troilite (!), very rich in FeNi or to use Michael Cottingham's
own words ... "loads of metal". The oval metal-sulfide inclusion that I
mentioned in my previous post measures a whopping six millimeters. What
is also very extraordinary about this inclusion is that the troilite is
surrounded by FeNi metal and not vice versa.

My 23.39-gram slice features a 3.5 millimeter FeNi bleb so close to the
outer edge of the cut and polished slice that most of it (ca. 90%) is
embedded in the "pitted crust".

This same slice has one of those dark inclusions but not only is it dark
but also featureless and devoid of FeNi metal. There is a thin seam of
minute FeNi "dots" all around it but the interior of this dark inclusion
is virtually free of nickel-iron. So maybe I am looking at a melt inclusion
(shock-melted as Lahoma is shock stage S4). Whether these dark inclusions
are xenolithic I don't know (yet). Time and professional meteoriticists
will tell :-)

When I mentioned the abundance of troilite, I added an exclamation mark
because there are not very many L5 chondrites with such an abundance of
troilite - only the fresher ones like Mount Tazerzait, Baszkowka.

Whadda meteorite!

Cheers,

Bernd
Received on Thu 03 Aug 2006 05:25:00 PM PDT