Here’s a gift idea for the holiday season — if you don’t mind something a little old, as in 4.5 billion years old.
An iron meteorite found in an Ocean Falls backyard in the 1960s will be up for bids in Lunds Auctioneers and Appraisers’ Top Notch auction on Dec. 10.
The chunk is “older than anything you would ever find on the surface of the Earth,” Christopher Herd, a University of Alberta professor who curates the university’s 2,400-specimen meteorite collection, said Tuesday from Edmonton.
“It would have formed from the primordial stuff that the solar system was made from.”
Lunds estimates the meteorite, which has been kept by family members since its discovery, could sell for $20,000 to $100,000.
There has been a spike in interest in owning meteorites as art pieces to display, Lunds president Peter Boyle said.
If a buyer wanted to take the meteorite out of Canada, however, they would have to apply for an export permit, because meteorites are considered cultural property by the federal government.
In some cases, owners will donate a portion of a meteorite to a Canadian institution and be permitted to take the remainder out of the country, Herd said.
This specimen is unusual because it’s the only iron meteorite from B.C. and only the fifth meteorite of any kind to have been found in this province, he said.
It was “incredibly fortunate” that the meteorite was found because B.C. is so mountainous, he said.
“The chances of finding something like that in the backyard of a little place like Ocean Falls, where there’s not a whole lot of surface area in the first place, are pretty low.”
Alberta has the most meteorites of any province “because most of our land is ranching and farming and there are wide open spaces,” Herd said.
In Alberta, it’s much easier to recover meteorites that are seen to have fallen, or to come across them while farming, said Herd, adding many people contact the university thinking they have found meteorites but in most cases they’re wrong.
Herd’s analysis determined that the Ocean Falls specimen is an iron meteorite with some nickel in it — just a small percentage — along with trace levels of other elements.
In order to be officially identified, a meteorite must be classified by an expert, analyzed and named.
The owners contacted the university and provided a piece to be classified and analyzed. That piece is now in the university’s meteorite collection.
Because it’s largely made up of iron, it weighs a hefty 19.23 kilograms — 42 pounds.
This type of iron meteorite is thought to come from metal-rich asteroids in the belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, Herd said.
When there are collisions between asteroids or something hits an asteroid, “the material gets blasted off and then it ends up in an orbit that takes it around the sun and crosses the orbit of earth,” before it ends up falling to the earth as a meteorite, he said.
Given the rust on the meteorite, that could have happened prehistorically, he said, or hundreds or thousands of years ago.
It’s hard to tell if the meteorite was on its own or part of a larger chunk, he said, adding this could have been the one piece that ended up on land, while the rest fell into the ocean.
“But often times, with an iron meteorite, they don’t break up that much. So it’s more likely it was a single piece of rock.”
cjwilson@timescolonist.com
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