Over 20 years ago, hard to believe I know, I posted an article here about the Rose City H5 Impact Melt Breccia. In the time that passed, Rose City turned 100 years old, and that was four years ago! It’s odd to be holding a century old witnessed fall that I acquired for my collection long before I ever considered it would break the 100 year mark. I just wasn’t thinking about such things way back then.
Recently, I took my 30 gram slice of Rose City out for a walk and it is so beautiful. The melt aspects are dramatic, and the flow of material is both obvious and glorious. Metal veining, blebbing, and even a partial metal ring grace the surface. Light colored inclusions are visible in the degrees of black and gray matrix. In fact, inside the partial metal ring are porous sections that also similar to other regions in the surface.
One of the amazing things about this Rose City slice is that the same surface provides vastly different appearances depending on the tilt and lighting. From a highly reflective polished surface absolutely stuffed with twinkling metal flake, to one overcome with flat grays, blacks and even deeper blacks.
The nickel-iron of this H5 chondrite is vast and can quickly overwhelm the viewing experience. But just a slight movement and the reflected brightness vanishes, the sparkle gone, and degrees of interacting darkness overlap each other documenting an ancient disagreement between two geologic mediums with smaller rocky communities caught up during the combat.
Impact melt breccias including Rose City capture the violence of cosmic collisions where the energy and heat of a battle for place reduced the solids to liquids, only to freeze again while still fighting. Billions of years later, the diamonds embedded in a spinning saw blade slice deep into the stone, opening it for the first time to the toxic atmosphere of earth. The melts from impact, once enemies, are now, forever, a single stone.
For more information about the history of the Rose City meteorite, and its place in my collection, please see my February, 2004 article on the topic.
Until next time….
