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Met Name

Met Type

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  Pallasite, PMG

TKW 755 kg. Fall not observed. Found 1951 in Chubut, Argentina.

 

Steve writes:

After waiting a quarter of a century for the right piece to come along, I was finally able to acquire a substantial slice of Esquel (Photo 1). But my personal journey with this beautiful pallasite meteorite actually began in the mid-1990s. At that time, my meteorite collection consisted of a dozen or so dime-sized pieces I’d recently acquired as part of a trade for a Celestron C8 telescope. In that meteorite assortment was a half-inch square part-slice of Esquel that exhibited a single example of its classic emerald green crystals.

I was committed to someday buying a more representative piece once I found one I could afford. During my first trip to the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show a few years later, Bob Haag was there with a very large number of Esquel slices for sale. As a relatively new collector, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to buy a nice piece directly from this meteorite celebrity, and I spent more than an hour culling through the various slices to find the "best" one for me. In the meantime, my wife – bored with my indecision – decided to move on to other rooms.

Finally, I found the one I wanted to take home. Excited at having made my decision, I presented it to one of Bob’s helpers to purchase. Amused at how much time I’d spent looking, he asked why I chose that particular slice. I explained it was thinner than most, so the surface area was larger compared to its weight; it was particularly gemmy, with several of Esquel’s signature green crystals; and with a length surpassing my palm, it was on the higher end of my price range, but still manageable.

I handed him my credit card to complete the transaction. "We don’t accept those – only cash or checks," he said. I explained my wife had the checkbook and was probably only two or three rooms away, so I asked if he would hold it for no more than ten minutes while I went and found her. He agreed, and I returned in half that time, eager to claim what would become the jewel of my current collection.

I quickly got the helper’s attention, but to my dismay, he said that a fellow standing behind me had watched me sort through several pieces, overheard my explanation for why I picked that one, and decided he wanted it. So the helper sold it to him while I was getting my checkbook. "But don’t worry," he said. "We have lots more you can pick from."

I told him I’d already looked through everything, and if that was the way they did business, there was no way I was going to buy anything from them. I huffed out of the room, which was probably a mistake since it was the cheapest price I’d ever again see for Esquel. And as a consequence of that, it would be another two decades before I finally got my first substantial piece.

[To be fair to Mr. Haag, I should mention that I never actually got to deal directly with him that day – I can’t honestly remember if he was even in the room at the time.]

Skip ahead to 2018, when I finally purchased from Bob Falls a 44.7 gram part slice with nice features (Photo 2). It was smaller than the one I’d missed all those years ago in Tucson, but still sufficiently nice. Around that same time, I’d seen a 31.4 gram tapered piece that Bob had set aside after truing up a chunk for taking subsequent slices. It was thirty percent lighter than the previous piece I’d purchased, yet it actually had a slightly larger surface area because of its varying width. It too was quite esthetic, and for whatever reason, I really liked its taper despite the loss of color in the olivine crystals at the thinnest edge. Two years later I was able to acquire that slice as well (Photo 3 shows it front lit, while Photo 4 was taken outside with it backlit).

Then more recently, Bob offered a piece that made me forget about the one that got away all those years ago. For me, this latest slice checked all the boxes: large surface area (Photo 5, front lit with a 1 cm cube for reference); a number of green olivine crystals (Photo 6, backlit to better show them); various areas of both dense crystals and of evenly distributed ones within the metal matrix (Photo 7 shows a spot with a combination of these features); and large examples of Esquel’s metal displaying its Widmanstätten patterns (Photo 8).

So with Esquel finally off of my list of wants, I can turn my efforts to the other hard-to-find "must haves" I’ve been looking for!

A BIT ON ESQUEL’s HISTORY

In 1951, while digging a hole for a water tank, a farmer near the Patagonian town of Esquel uncovered a meteorite at an unspecified location (Esquel is a town in the northwestern province of Chubut, Argentina). In 1992, Bob Haag purchased the meteorite from the finder and brought it to the United States for subsequent cutting and sale.

Esquel is a main group pallasite – a type of stony-iron meteorite consisting of olivine crystals suspended in a nickel-iron matrix. Like many other pallasites, Esquel’s translucent crystals are made of olivine – a mineral type that includes the gemstone peridot. Esquel is especially popular with collectors in part because of its resistance to oxidation, but more for its bright, gem-quality olivine crystals that many feel make Esquel the most beautiful pallasite ever found.

It should be noted that most pallasites’ crystals are yellowish or orange in color. While naturally emerald green, the color of olivine crystals can be altered by the superheated liquid metal surrounding the silicates during their formation; similarly, heat from ablation can discolor the crystals, as can terrestrial weathering.

As an aside, the first pallasite meteorite was discovered in 1749 by blacksmith Yakov Medvedev and his mining foreman IK Mettikh about 235 km south of Krasnoyarsk, near the village of Medvedevo in Russia’s Siberian Mountains. Then in January of 1772, it was shown to German naturalist Simon Peter Pallas, who had a piece sent to St. Petersburg the next year. Ernst Chladni studied it in 1794, and it became the first acid-etched meteorite, being treated by George Thomson a few years before Widmanstätten’s famous observation. Because of a paper on Krasnoyarsk published by Pallas in 1777, the group of these rare meteorites was named after him. Pallasites are relatively rare, making up less than 2% of known meteorite falls.