76th Annual Meteoritical Society Meeting (2013) 5365.pdf

A BRIEF REVIEW OF CANADIAN . G. C. Wilson1, P. J. A. McCausland2 and H. Plotkin3 1Turnstone Geological Services Limited, P.O. Box 1000, Campbellford, ON Canada K0L 1L0. E-mail: [email protected]; 2Depart- ment of Earth Sciences, Western University, London, ON Canada N6A 3K7; 3Department of Philosophy, Western University, Lon- don, ON Canada N6A 5B8.

We present a brief overview of Canadian meteorites with a focus on noting significant recent falls, finds and research devel- opments. To date, 61 Canadian meteorites have received official international recognition from the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society, while at least a dozen more are “in pro- cess” for submission to the Meteoritical Bulletin [1]. The 61 Met. Bull. records (45 finds and 16 falls since the recognition of the Madoc iron in 1854) include 26 irons, 3 and 32 stony meteorites. The latter include 14, 11 and 3 H, L and LL chon- drites, 2 carbonaceous and 2 enstatite chondrites, but surprisingly no . The most intensively researched met- eorites [1,2] are (C2 ungrouped) and (EH5), followed by Bruderheim (L6) and Springwater (). Bruderheim, a 1960 fall, is widely distributed, being the heaviest reported Canadian at 303 kg TKW. Seven Canadian meteorites exceed 100 kg TKW, 37 are between 1 and 50 kg, and 17 are <1 kg. Recent years have seen the addition of the Tagish Lake, Buzzard Coulee and Grimsby meteorite falls, all of which have well-determined fireball trajectories and thus well-known orbits, a striking Canadian addition to the handful that are known worldwide. The discovery of the Holocene Whitecourt iron im- pact crater is similarly a significant recent development in under- standing the impactor flux. Meteoritic research in Canada is on the upswing: advanced programs include the optimization of fire- ball tracking networks to aid in impactor flux determination and possible meteorite recovery, and development of techniques for materials characterization of the payloads of sample-return mis- sions. The lessons learned on meteorites will in the next genera- tion be applied, in all probability, to newly recovered samples from the Moon, Mars, and . Acknowledgments: We thank numerous meteorite collect- ors, museum curators and other colleagues for providing informa- tion and friendly discussions on Canadian meteorites. References: [1] Wilson G.C. and McCausland P.J.A. 2013. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 50 no.1, 4-13. [2] http://www.turnstone.ca/canmetbib.htm.