Meteorite Name: Canyon Diablo
Country: U.S.A.
State/District: Arizona, Coconino County
Coordinates: 35°03'N, 111°02'E
Date of find: 1891
Type: Iron IAB, octahedrite coarse
Total known weight (TKW): 30,000 kg (approx.)

Dimensions: 118.4 x 93.7 x 64.3 mm max.

This is a fragment in AS FOUND condition.

Description:

In the vicinity of a crater like elevation, known as "Coon Butt" or "Meteorite Crater", approx. 10 miles SE od Canyon Diablo numerous masses totalling more than 30 tons ranging from minute sizes to pieces over 500 kg have been found. The locality was first reported 1891 by A.E. Foote.

The Meteorite Crater (also known as "Barringer Meteor Crater") is a gigantic hole in the middle of the arid sandstone of the Arizona desert. A rim of smashed and jumbled boulders, some of them the size of small houses, rises 150 feet above the level of the surrounding plain. The crater itself is nearly a mile wide, and 570 feet deep.

When Europeans first discovered the crater, the plain around it was covered with chunks of meteoritic iron - over 30 tons of it, scattered over an area 8 to 10 miles in diameter.

'Meteorite Crater' is probably the best preserved meteorite impact site and definately the most famous in the world. An other beautiful preserved meteorite crater is "Wolfe Creek" meteorite crater in Western Australia, named in 1889 after Robert Wolfe, a prospector and storekeeper of Halls Creek, who was chairman of the Kimberley Goldfields Roads Board.

Radiometric dating of the meteorite itself suggests an age of about 4.5 billion years, suggesting it was formed at the very beginning of the Solar System, and which makes it among the oldest material known to exist ( the oldest rocks being only half its age!). The metal of the meteorite is crystallized internally in a beautiful crisscross array, known as the Widmanstätten Pattern which is unique to iron meteorites, and develops because the meteorite has cooled from a molten state in zero gravity at a rate of only a few degrees per million years.

We hope you will enjoy owning this unique piece of our Solar System, your own Space Traveler, from way out there.

Check this URL for more information about this great meteorite crater: http://www.barringercrater.com/science/

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