[Rockhounds] Edscottite

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

It was found along the side of a road in a remote Australian gold rush
town. In the old days, Wedderburn was a hotspot for prospectors – it
occasionally still is
<https://www.sciencealert.com/australian-man-unearths-2-7kg-gold-nugget-worth-135k>
–
but nobody there had ever seen a nugget quite like this one.

The Wedderburn meteorite
<https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?code=24229>, found just
north-east of the town in 1951, was a small 210-gram chunk of
strange-looking space rock that fell out of the sky. For decades,
scientists have been trying to decipher its secrets, and researchers just
decoded another.

In a study published in August this year, led by Caltech mineralogist Chi Ma
<https://www.its.caltech.edu/~chima/>, scientists analysed the Wedderburn
meteorite and verified the first natural occurrence of what they call '
edscottite
<https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ammin.2019.104.issue-9/am-2019-7102/am-2019-7102.xml>':
a rare form of iron-carbide mineral
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cementite> that's never been found in nature.

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-discovered-a-mineral-never-before-seen-in-nature