DISCOVERY OF THE TIBERRHAMINE, ALGERIAN SAHARA, STONY METEORITE

Name: TIBERRHAMINE

Place of discovery: 70 km south-southeast (170^°) from the village of Tiberrhame, 84 km northeast (72^°) of the city of Adrar (Touat Valley), Western Tademait Plateau, Algerian Sahara, Algeria.

28^° 07'N, 0^° 32'E.

Date of find: October 24, 1967.

Class and type: Stony. Olivine-hypersthene chondrite.

Number of individual specimens: 1, in many pieces.

Total weight: 107 kg

Circumstances of discovery: Three broken pieces were found on a Quaternary gravel overlying the Cretaceous Plateau on October 24, 1967, by J. Ph. Lefranc, geologist at the Centre de Recherches sur les Zones Andes, C.N.R.S., Paris, collaborator of the Algerian Geological Survey. On March 15, 1968, 196 additional pieces were found by M. Lefranc. All of the pieces lay in an area 30 m x 18 m. Desert varnish on broken surfaces shows an age of several centuries.

Source: Paul Pellas, Laboratoire de Mineralogie, Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. Mireille Christophe Michel-Levy, Claude Levy, Jean-Phillippe Lefranc and H. B. Wiik, 1970. La meteorite de Tiberrhamine (Sahara algerien). Bull. Soc. fr. Mineral. Cristallogr. 93, 114-119.