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Met Name

Met Type

Thin Sections

4.429 kg. 112 x 155 x 89 mm.   Iron, IIAB

TKW 23 MT. Observed fall 12 February 1947, Primorskiy kray, Russia.


       

Darryl and Alan write:

In celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Sikhote Alin event, here is Lot # 63 in Christie’s current Deep Impact sale. I acquired it in an exchange from the Russian Academy of Sciences in the early 90s. Numerology is not my thing but I always liked this specimen being 22444. As most are aware, Sikhote Alin’s journey commenced 320 million years ago, when a giant iron mass broke-off from its parent body before slamming into Earth's atmosphere — 75 years ago today, it produced a fireball brighter than the Sun as it sailed over Siberia’s Sikhote-Alin Mountains — which is smack in the middle of the range of the Siberian Tiger. The shockwaves from the low altitude explosion were massive and would have caused extensive destruction had the area been more densely populated. Sonic booms were heard more than 300 kilometers away and a 33-kilometer-long smoke trail persisted in the sky for several hours. The resulting meteorites produced impact craters as large as 26 meters — with nearly 200 craters having been catalogued. A famous painting of the event by artist and eye-witness P. I. Medvedev was reproduced as a postage stamp issued by the Soviet government to commemorate the 10 year anniversary of the event of what many witnesses thought was the end of the world. A pair of these stamps accompanies this specimen.

This meteorite is blanketed with scores of regmaglypts (thumbprint-like indentations produced during a meteorite’s blazing plunge through Earth’s upper atmosphere) and contains patches of fusion crust — another artifact of atmospheric frictional heating — and like 62 of the 66 lots offered, it is available at no reserve.