Iron, coarse octahedrite – IIAB Maritime Territory, Siberia, Russia (46°9' N, 134°39' E)

Wrapped in a pewter-hued patina with charcoal accents, the two faces of this meteorite are markedly different. One side is blanketed in regmaglypts while the other reveals cleavage along a crystalline plane.
94 x 54 x 44 mm. (3¾ x 2 x 1¾ in.) and 471.1 g. (1 lb)

A fascinating example of a cataclysmic event frozen in time from one of the largest meteorite showers in modern times.
After breaking off its parent asteroid 320 million years ago, a massive iron mass wandered through interplanetary space until a close encounter with Earth on February 12, 1947. A fireball brighter than the Sun was seen to explode at an altitude of about 6 kilometers over eastern Siberia. Sonic booms were heard at distances up to 300 kilometers from the point of impact. Chimneys collapsed, windows shattered and trees were uprooted. A 33-kilometer long smoke trail persisted for several hours in the atmosphere after impact. Iron fragments were scattered over a broad elliptical area. Many of the meteorites penetrated the soil, producing impact craters up to 26 meters across; about 200 such depressions have been catalogued. A famous painting of the event by artist and eye-witness P. I. Medvedev was reproduced as a postage stamp issued by the Soviet government in 1957 to commemorate the impact’s 10th anniversary.
As evidenced by the regmaglypts (thumbprint-like shapes) blanketing one side of this mass this meteorite was not part of the massive low altitude explosion. Instead, this specimen broke off at a higher altitude, providing sufficient time for frictional heating with the atmosphere to form the regmaglypts now seen. The groove-like reverse is evidence of this meteorite having exploded apart yet again, and at such a low altitude additional regmaglypts were unable to form.

Christie's would like to thank Dr. Alan E. Rubin at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles for his assistance in preparing this catalog note.