Brahin meteorite, Gomel Region, Belarusi

Regional Level Types
Brahin meteorite	Meteorite Fall Location
Gomel Region	Province
Belarus	Country

Official name: Brahin
Synonyms: Bragin; Komarinsky; Kruki; Krukov; Minsk; Rokitskii; Rocicky; Rokicky.
Observed fall: no
Found: 13 masses/fragments in the period 1810 (1807?)-2002. According to most sources, the first two masses were discovered in 1810, however they might have been found in 1807 or in any case no later than 1809.
Coordinates (Catalogue of Meteorites; Meteoritical Bulletin): 52°30' N, 30°20' E
Recovered weight: >1050 kg
Pallasite, Main Group (PMG)


Thirteen recorded masses/fragments of this meteorite are known. However, it is highly probable that several other masses/fragments were found but not officially recorded. The area of the findings, crossed by the Dnieper River, extends about 15 km in latitudinal and 3 km in longitudinal direction.

According to most sources, the first two masses were discovered in 1810, however they might have been found in 1807 or in any case no later than 1809. These two masses were found at the same time by peasants, about two hundred yards one from the other, at the Kutsovka (Куцовка) locality, near the village of Kaporenki (Капоренки), on the sand hills amongst marshes. At the end of the 19th century, the third mass, weighing 182 kg, was discovered 2-3 km east of the Kruki (Круки) village, at the distance of 15 km west from the place of the first findings. At the beginning of the 20th century, other two masses were found in the area: one of them, extracted at a depth of 90-106 cm while digging a well, has been lost; the other one, weighing 66.5 kg, is preserved in the meteorite collection of the Russian Academy of Science until now. In 1927 other two specimens, wheighing 543 and 340 g respectively, were recorded from the Kolyban (Колыбань) village. In 1937, the largest of all masses, weighing 270 kg, was discovered at a depth of 120 cm while digging a trench 1.5 km to the southeast of Kruki. In 1938, a mass of 16 kg was recovered at a depth of 30-40 cm while digging clay 2 km east of Kaporenki. The last two specimens, preserved at the Geological Institute of the Byelorussian Academy of Science, disappeared during the German occupation of Minsk. Another mass (named "Bragin" in Meteoritical Bulletin no. 44), weighing 12.391 kg, was found in the summer of 1968 by the young girl Anya Fedosenko on an arable field, at the edge of a small bog, 0.4 km north of the village of Lyady. The discovery of a twelfth fragment of the Brahin meteorite in 1981 permitted to enlarge the list of minerals contained in the meteorite, adding pentlandite and cohenite to the previously detected minerals (olivine, kamacite, taenite, schreibersite, troilite, and stanfieldite). An additional mass of 227 kg was found at a depth of 3.0 m in 2002.

More recent studies on the Brahin meteorite have also evidenced the presence of: phosphoran olivine, whitlockite (actually merrillite), chromite, daubreelite, and silica in melt inclusions in olivine crystals (Sonzogni et al., 2009); graphite, mackinawite, wüstite, silicate glass, lawrencite, K-Na feldspar, haxonite, heazlewoodite, and panethite (Bakhtin et al., 2017).

Olivine is forsterite with an average composition Fa_11.7 in Wasson & Choi (2003) and Fa_11.34 in McKibbinn et al. (2019). The ∆¹⁷O value is -0.31.

References

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality