I’ve never been to the crater, but I doubt that the Barringers are selling anything. There are collectors/dealers selling “old stock”, though. Like in one of the links I posted earlier, where you can get a few milligrams in a stoppered glass bottle in a gem jar for $15. (That’s a 1 cm scale cube at the bottom.) So extremely expensive on a “spot price of iron and nickel” basis but cheap on a “this is bits of an asteroid that collided with Earth so hard that it turned into a rain of molten iron” basis.
But there just doesn’t seem to be that many people actually interested in owning a piece of space. Some rare types of meteorites with very scarce supplies go for big dollars and are snatched up quickly by the small community of active collectors (and wealthy speculators), but there are others that are available by the ton that sellers practically can’t give away. So the market for selling Nininger Spherules as a collector’s item is likely far, far, far smaller than the amount of spherules in the ground there.
Larger pieces of Canyon Diablo are for sale for around $2 a gram online, but they continue to be available for sale online. Meaning nobody has snatched them up. They aren’t an item with a constantly renewing inventory as they are sold, they are “I have these few and when they are gone, they’re gone” things. And yet the handful available sit for years unsold. The public interest just doesn’t seem to be there.
Various watchmakers have been making those for maybe close to 20 years now. Doing a little rough figuring, a 40 mm dial would be maybe around 1.5mm thick (taking mid-figure from my guess of 1 mm to 2 mm) which means around 2 cc of Gibeon. Call the density 7.5 g/cc (range for irons around 7 to 8) gives you a 15 gram slice. Gibeon can be bought for around $4 a gram. There will be a lot of waste in cutting into rounds like that, but still the dial shouldn’t cost the watch maker more than $50 or $60 in bulk. A small part of the cost of an expensive watch.
I have a 15mm Gibeon disc, I suppose it was cut for a women’s watch.
Would I be right in presuming that some of the spherules around the crater would be formed from material that was just part of the ground that the meteorite struck? The soil in the locality is red, probably indicating a significant iron content; the meteorite wouldn’t just have blown the surface material around, would it?
No, as far as I can tell the metal in the spherules is all meteorite-derived. In fact the spherules tend to have a higher concentration of nickel than the bulk meteorite, meaning that there is missing iron. I’m guessing that’s related to Iron having a lower boiling temperature than nickel, 2861 ⁰C vs. 2913 ⁰C.
Here are a few related PDFs I dug up, very interesting even though the geochemistry is above my level (and probably of pretty much everyone else here except @MrDibble)
As you probably know, “just part of the ground” ejecta from craters includes tektites, which come from much larger impacts than Meteor Crater. This is one of the best all in one place rundowns on tektites that I’ve found even though it is on a crystal woo site:
Finally, I just found a really nice photo of a variety of Canyon Diablo spherules, some of which are relatively gigantic (they are by a standard 1 cm scale cube).
