Seymchan Meteorite Cube

The Seymchan meteorite was discovered in 1967 near the settlement of Seymchan in the Magadan district of Russia's subarctic Far East region. As a pallasitic meteorite, it represents fewer than 0.2% of all known meteorites and originated from the mantle-core boundary of an asteroid that broke apart during the early history of our solar system. Following pinball-like impacts, a portion of the meteorite was serendipitously bumped into an Earth-crossing orbit.

This meteorite cube displays Seymchan's iron-nickel matrix on all six sides with distinctive Widmanstätten patterning, the result of slow cooling over millions of years which provided sufficient time for the two iron-nickel alloys present in the meteorite to orient into a crystalline habit. As Widmanstätten latticework only appears within differentiated asteroids in the vacuum of space, this pattern is considered diagnostic in the identification of a meteorite.