A Meteorite Wasted

A few weeks ago, I posted a nice article on how to buy meteorites. One of the sections at the end discussed the relative pitfalls of acquiring meteorites, some of these bits of advice may or may not have been rooted in my own personal experience.

My greatest meteorite purchase was an etched, cut slab of Campo del Cielo that I purchased from a meteorite vendor at Quartzite Arizona. The slab is about five inches by seven inches by one quarter inch thick. When I bought it, the slab was amazingly clean of rust and weighted about a half pound. There is a great Widmanstatten pattern and large silicate grains. I kept the slab on display in an open cabinet in a consistently dry climate.

About three months after we cut the check and brought the rock home, I noticed a few red spots along the grain boundaries of the Widmanstatten pattern. Since then, the slab has continued to degrade by rusting, even to the point of creating an edge that has separated the metal grain boundaries. Oxygen and iron are a little bit bigger than the crystal matrix of iron alone, so the metal will continue to bulge and break itself apart, letting in even more oxygen which will allow it to continue to rust away.

I have no great advice for ways to avoid this fate once it begins. The best chance I had was to place the slab in a hermetically sealed, moisture controlled display case. But in the end the meteorite was destined to go the way of entropy. While I have seen internet peddlers with ways of cleaning up and treating rusty meteorites, I tend to think they are snake oil salesmen - once the rust begins, it is like an infection with no cure.

And so, my greatest meteorite purchase was also my greatest meteorite waste. Hopefully I will learn a lot about how meteorites degrade over time with this amazing space rock.