1.14" Springwater Pallasite Meteorite (11.8 g) - Canada

The Springwater Pallasite

The Springwater Pallasite is a historic meteorite found in 1931 by farmers clearing rocks from a field in Saskatchewan, Canada. Locals near the strewn field collected and sold pieces of it to get by during the Great Depression. The largest mass is currently held by the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto as a national treasure of Canada.

This pallasite has small, green to golden peridot crystals and contains the rare phosphate mineral farringtonite.

About Pallasites

Pallasite meteorites are a class of stony-iron meteorites. They were once believed to have originated at the core-mantle boundary of asteroids that shattered through impacts, but a recent hypothesis is that they are a mixture of core and mantle minerals.

Pallasite meteorites consist of olivine (peridot) crystals surrounded by iron-nickel matrix. Upon acid etching, some pallasites display interweaving structures known as Widmanstätten patterns (or Thomson lines) in the metallic matrix. These structures are iron-nickel alloy crystals, typically kamacite and taenite, that cooled over millions of years in the vacuum of space.

Pallasites are quite rare: only about 200 are known, and only four have had observed falls. This represents less than 0.2% of all classified meteorites!