Historical Romanian meteorites: emendations of official catalogue records

• Main Authors: Dana Lüttge-Pop, Razvan A. Andrei, Nicolae Har
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cluj University Press 2013-12-01
• Series: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai: Geologia
• Online Access: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/geologia/vol58/iss2/art5/

With its more than 50,000 valid official and provisory meteorite entries, the online catalogue of The Meteoritical Society, i.e., the Meteoritical Bulletin Database (MBDB) represents the most authorized and primary source of information in the field. Unfortunately, this official reference contains some erroneous geographical information in the case of five historical Romanian meteorites. For Zsadany, the current country information is “Hungary, Bekes county” instead of Romania, Timiş County. For Mezö-Madaras and Tauti, the county affiliations “Harghita” and respectively “Cluj” have to be corrected into Mureş and Arad, respectively. Geographical coordinates for Kakowa and Ohaba require minor corrections, only. The source of these errors resides in changes of names and administrative affiliations of the localities of the fall/find, while the formal nomenclature protocol requires the meteorite name in the original description to be preserved. The example of the historical Romanian meteorites illustrates the challenges that a researcher unfamiliar with a region faces when locating old specimens, in general. This requires knowledge of regional history and geography, and sometimes access to the original references - usually not written in English, or having a somehow limited circulation. Additionally, in the last two decades several new publications provided more detailed classification information on Sopot, Ohaba, Tauti and Mocs meteorites. Sopot was classified as H5, with shock stage S3. The studied Ohaba and Tauti samples also attested S3 shock stages. Variable shock stages (S3-5) were identified in Mocs samples, the most well-known Romanian meteorite. This new information should be added to the corresponding MBDB entries.