Meteor De Campo 23,60 gram

Gran Chaco Gualamba, Argentina 27 degrees 39 minutes south, 61 degrees 44 minutes west; 150 m Polycrystalline, coarse octahedrite, Og. Group I. 6.68% Ni, 0.43% Co, 0.25% P, 87 ppm Ga, 407 ppm Ge, 3.6 ppm Ir. HISTORY According to the excellent work of Alvarez (1926), the history of this interesting shower of irons goes back to the Spanish exploration in about 1576. At that time, an expedition under the leadership of Captain de Miraval traversed the Gran Chaco Gualamba and brought back a few fragments of a large mass called Meson de Fierro (large table of iron). This was appropriately enough located in a district called Campo del Cielo (Field of the Sky) an open, brush-covered plain which, although stretching for some hundreds of kilometers, was devoid of stones and water and had a very porous topsoil. Alvarez (1926: 19) stated that the Governor ofSantiago del Estero exprssly sent Miraval to locate the iron which was known to the Indians and was regarded as having fallen from heaven. Later expeditions, in 1774, 1776 and 1779, brought back more material. For a time it was considered to be a rich silver ore (1/5 silver, 4/5 iron) and in 1778 a large amount of mercury was dispatched from Almaden, Spain, in order to avoid delay in extracting the silver from the supposed ore (Alvarez: 33). However, a commission of blacksmiths, and the analyst O'Gorman, independently deduced from their results that the mass was absolutely devoid of silver and was an iron of superior quality. In 1783 Rubin de Celis, a lieutenant of the royal Spanish Navy, relocated the mass near Otumps and excavated its ay and ash bed\ (Celis 1788). In order to ascertain whether the iron had roots of was part of a metallic vein, as assumed by many early visitors, de Celis dug trenches around the mass and tipped it over. He made a curious remark that the iron was sustained upon two, thin corr