Sometimes I sit in the dark and touch my meteorite.

Sometimes I sit in the dark and touch my meteorite.

A firm and heavy iron meteorite belonging to the chemical group IIAB, its coarse octahedrite structure feels rough beneath my eager fingers, its strange regmaglypted surface the result of hot and heavy atmospheric ablation at 5.6km above the Earth’s surface.

I think about the 93% iron, 5.9% nickel, 0.42% cobalt, 0.46% phosphorus, and 0.28% sulfur that lends it most of its mass. How deeply that mass must have plunged into the fertile Earth waiting below, the impact crater filling with hot and gooey tektites and the Earth releasing her dirty, dirty meteoric dust with a shudder and groan.

I can almost taste the trace amounts of germanium and iridium on my wanting tongue, my bottom lip quivering as I think about other minerals present: taenite, plessite, troilite, chromite, kamacite, and schreibersite. Mmmmm.

Sometimes I sit in the dark and touch my meteorite.

– Stolen from the Facebook page “50 Shades of Science“