Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Meteoric iron
Summary
Meteoric iron, sometimes meteoritic iron, is a native metal and early-universe protoplanetary-disk remnant found in meteorites and made from the elements iron and nickel, mainly in the form of the mineral phases kamacite and taenite. Meteoric iron makes up the bulk of iron meteorites but is also found in other meteorites. Apart from minor amounts of telluric iron, meteoric iron is the only naturally occurring native metal of the element iron (in metallic form rather than in an ore) on the Earth's surface.
The bulk of meteoric iron consists of taenite and kamacite. Taenite is a face-centered cubic and kamacite a body-centered cubic iron-nickel alloy.
Meteoric iron can be distinguished from telluric iron by its microstructure and perhaps by its chemical composition also, since meteoritic iron contains more nickel and less carbon.
Trace amounts of gallium and germanium in meteoric iron can be used to distinguish different meteorite types. The meteoric iron in stony iron meteorites is identical to the "gallium-germanium group" of the iron meteorites.
Meteoric iron forms a few different structures that can be seen by etching or in thin sections of meteorites. The Widmanstätten pattern forms when meteoric iron cools and kamacite is exsolved from taenite in the form of lamellas. Plessite is a more fine-grained intergrowth of the two minerals in between the lamella of the Widmanstätten pattern. Neumann lines are fine lines running through kamacite crystals that form through impact-related deformation.
Before the advent of iron smelting, meteoric iron was the only source of iron metal apart from minor amounts of telluric iron. Meteoric iron was already used before the beginning of the Iron Age to make cultural objects, tools and weapons.
Many examples of iron working from the Bronze Age have been confirmed to be meteoritic in origin.
In ancient Egypt an iron metal bead was found in a graveyard near Gerzeh that contained 7.5% Ni. Dated to around 3200 BC, geochemical analysis of the Gerzeh iron beads, based on the ratio of nickel to iron and cobalt, confirms that the iron was meteoritic in origin.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.