Author name: Michael Kelly

I figured I would flip the script for this entry in the series and talk about the man before talking about the mineral. The Field Museum of Chicago is well known for having a world-renowned collection of meteorites. That distinction is due to the early work of Oliver C. Farrington who joint the museum in 1893 at its founding and

Buckle up folks, with two falls of of background data, personal thought, a recap of my Wadsworth Ohio hunt and plenty of finder Q and A from folks in both strewnfields I think this is my longest article so far. The answers to the Q and A I found impressive, I tried to cast a wide net  from first time

In this latest edition of the Type Localities series, we will be looking at Zaklodzie. Zaklodzie is a Polish find that turned up on the side of a road in September 1998. It was found by Stanislaw Jachymek while he was out hunting fossils and rocks.  The 19.1 Lb. (8.68 Kg) single stone find is a great example of the

In this installation, I wanted to focus on meteorites whose arrival made waves, first physically and then literally based on their splashdowns. I am very guilty of collecting meteorites that have shared eccentric backstories. Given the Earth is covered by ~71 percent water, statistically speaking, most meteorites make a splashdown vs a terra firma touchdown. That said, the ones that

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the White Rabbit provides Alice the following advice on stories: “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop”, sound advice from the loquacious lagomorph. This particular story doesn’t begin with rabbits, rather a minor obsession I have with collecting meteorites with interesting names. It doesn’t matter

Wadsleyite like several other of the minerals that have meteoritic type localities has a lab synthesized origin story. The synthetic material [𝛽- (Mg,Fe)₂SiO₄)] was created in 1966 by Alfred Edward Ringwood and Alan Major, both of whom were honored with minerals named after them that happen to also have meteoritic type localities. In 1970 Ringwood and Major proposed that should

A bright daytime fireball was witnessed over Georgia at around 16:25 Universal Time (UT) on the 26th of June. 239 reports of the bolide from as far away North Carolina, Alabama and Florida were logged with the American Meteor Society’s fireball log. The log includes five videos including one doorbell videocam in which a prominent sonic boom can be heard.

The Metbul provides the following basic information on Turpan 003. It is a IIIAB Iron found in the desert outside of Turpan City, Xinjiang Provenance China by Ashanjiang Mahemuti on 15 March 2022. Originally only a low gram count single find; additional searches over the course of the following year turned up multiple masses with a range of sizes from

Though not unprecedented, it’s not overly common for a manmade material to become a mineral. Minerals must have a natural occurring source. It is from this first found naturally occurring source that the term Type Locality is derived. In the case of Krotite, CaAl2O4 was synthetically derived before being found naturally in a CAI within NWA 1934 in 2011. Krotite

December 10th brought the United States its last fall of the year. The American Meteor Society received 48 reports from across 5 states: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Montana and Wisconsin, for an event at 4:05 AM local time accompanied by sonic booms. The event was recorded by multiple doorbell cameras and showed prominent fragmentation flashed. By late morning the local news

There are meteorites out there that set the bar. If you ask a meteorite collector to describe how nicely colored and translucent the olivines are in a new pallasite, they can compare it to those in Fukang or Esquel. But what do you compare an impact melt breccia to, that maybe has more in common visually to foundry slag than

Meteorite collections can head down a lot of interesting paths. Some folks focus on collecting aesthetic pieces, others only irons, meteorites from their home state is a common theme as is focusing on witnessed falls from your country. I remember early on when I had just started collecting, reading an article that warned against going into collecting without a focus.

I have to admit I have a soft spot for Australian Meteorites. That fondness stacked on top of my constant search for meteorites that are mineral type localities, and a separate love for meteorites that would qualify under the traditional definition of “antique”, makes Tenham a hat-trick type collection piece for me. Tenham fell near Tenham Station, Queensland Australia in

  This is the second installment on a series that focuses in on meteorites that bear the title of type locality. Be that of an entire grouping of meteorites in the overarching classification scheme or just a new mineral or two never before observed by science. Suizhou is by class quite inconspicuous. After all its one of 12,364 classified L6s,

On 15 February 2023 at around 5:30 in the afternoon local time a small body entered the earth’s atmosphere above Texas. The American Meteor Society log of the event, 1036-2023 records only nine reports with no video or still photographs. Despite not standing out from the background of the other AMS log records, video capture of the prominent sonic boom,