Meteoric stone

Meteor-stahl, m. meteoric steel, -staub, m. meteoric dust, -stein, m. meteoric stone, aerolite. 

The first tolerably accurate narration of the fall of a meteoric stone, said W. T. Brande, relates to that of Ensisheim, near Basle, upon the Rhine. The account which is deposited in the church was thus A.D. 1492, Wednesday, 7 November, there was a loud clap of thunder, and a child saw a stone fall from heaven it struck into a field of wheat, and did no harm, but made a hole there. The noise it made was heard at Lucerne, Villing, and oilier places on the Monday, King Maximilian ordered the stone to be brought to the castle, and after having conversed about it with the noblemen, said the people of Ensisheim should hang it up in their church. . (176). 

Niokel and iron combine and form a very hard alloy, which is that found in meteoric stones. 1 Cobalt, copper, silver, gold, platinum, palladium, and. other more rare metals, all combine in small proportions with iron, producing alloys of no known. value in the arts. 

In contrast to the occurrence of thallium as trace element, thallium minerals are very rare. Crookesite (from Skrikerum/ Sweden) is a mixture of the selenides of copper, thallium, and silver. Similar chemical compositions have been found in berze-lianite (Germany) and lorandite (Macedonia). Thallium has also been found in extraterrestrial material meteoric stones contain 0.001 to 0.2 tgg whilst lunar minerals contain 0.0006 to 0.0024 pgg (Urey 1952, Wedepohl 1974). 

Some wave phenomena, familiar to many people from the human senses, include the easy undulation of water waves from a dropped stone or the sharp shock of the sonic boom from high-speed aircraft. The great power and energy of shock events is apparent to the human observer as he stands on the rim of the Meteor Crater of Arizona. Human senses provide little insight into the transition from these directly sensed phenomena to the high-pressure, shock-compression effects in solids. This transition must come from development of the science of shock compression, based on the usual methods of scientific experimentation, theoretical modeling, and numerical simulation. 

The dust which is carried down with rain, hail, or snow has been analyzed by many. W. Stark, A. F. Wiegmand, W. L. Zimmermann, R. Braudes, C. Bertels, J. D. Bohlig. etc., noted the presence of calcium salts—chiefly sulphate—in rain-water J. Girardin, in hail-stones and A. F. Wiegmand, in snow-water. The last-named also noted the presence of phosphates in atm. dust—vide infra, chlorides, etc. A. Ditte, and W. N. Hartley and H. Ramage have discussed the occurrence of metals as well as meteoric dusts in the atmosphere. 

In all probability during his search for suitable stones early mai. occasionally stumbled across meteoric iron. Finding that it did not crack on being hammered,2 that it possessed great tenacity and... 

Interesting side-lights on the customs of prehistoric man are afforded by the behaviour of his modern representatives in uncivilised countries. Thus Ross in his Arctic explorations in 1818 came across certain Eskimos who carried knives consisting of blades of meteoric iron set into bone handles.1 The pieces of metal had been detached with great labour from the softest of three masses of metal of meteoric origin at Melville Bay, and had then been cold worked with stone hammers. 

IRON (melting point 1538 C) is the most common metal on Earth, but is almost never found in native state. It was found by the ancients in the form of meteors, which were initially worked like stone. Manmade iron may have been available as early as around 2500 BC but was not common until over a millennium later. Iron ore is easily REDUCED by charcoal but can only... 

Meteoric iron was known to primitive man and both worshipped and used by him during the stone age. Numerous meteorites have been found in different parts of the world they vary greatly both in size and in composition. The largest known is the Hoba West meteorite which lies where it was found at Grootfontein, S. W. Africa. It is a roughly rectangular mass, 3 X 3 X 1 cu. metres,... 

However, the diamond Dg is not unique out of the classical structure, showing all-hexagonal rings of sp carbon atoms in a cubic network (space group Fd3m), there is Lonsdaleite (Frondel and Marvin 1967 He et al. 2002) a rare stone of pure carbon discovered at Meteor Crater, Arizona, in 1967 and also several hypothetical diamond-like networks (Sunada 2008 Diudea et al. 2010). The Lonsdaleite hexagonal network (space group P6 lmmc) is illustrated in Fig. 11.2. 

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