MIAC / CCMI Compact Catalogue of Canadian Meteorites

The 4th edition of the Natural History Museum catalogue of meteorites (Graham et al., 1985), lists only 46 authenticated meteorites for Canada, the world's second-largest country, compared with, e.g., Chile (35 from <8% of Canada's surface area) and India (33% of the area, yielding 124 meteorites from 18 states, 38 from the state of Uttar Pradesh alone). Traill (1980) noted that the National Museum in Ottawa had samples of 36 of the 46 Canadian meteorites. There are few discrepancies in nomenclature between his catalogue and Graham et al.; Traill omitted Wynyard and included the discredited Akpohon.In the past 14 years, the modest total of Canadian falls and finds has risen erratically by six or seven; Penouille, Lac Dodon and St-Robert in Quebec (albeit Leeds may be a synonym of Toluca; S.A. Kissin, unpublished data), Hodgeville and Burstall (Saskatchewan) and Toronto and Kitchener (Ontario). The following list contains 53 (52 without Leeds) approved and 5 discredited names from nine jurisdictions (only Nova Scotia, P. E. I. and Newfoundland currently lack any contenders for `provincial meteorite'!). Meteorites for which fundamental data (such as proper classification) are lacking include Hodgeville, Burstall, Kitchener and Holman Island.

If Leeds is really Toluca, the total is now 52 'Canadian' meteorites. The 52 include 13 falls and 39 finds. The source of this compilation, CANAMET, is a small 'metadatabase' of Canadian meteorites. This is the second 'official' printout of the catalogue (Wilson, 1997).

It should be useful in two contexts;

1. Planning research projects. The class, capsule history and total amount of each meteorite is presented. A glimpse of research history is provided by the number of references to each find or fall in the MINLIB annotated bibliographic database (see, e.g., Wilson and Mendelsohn, 1999). MINLIB now comprises 48,700 records; some 2,750 records are relevant to meteorites and nucleosynthesis, 3,600 (7.5%) to the larger field of meteorites, tektites, the K-T boundary, impact events and impact structures. The MINLIB citations for each of the 82 meteorites were totaled on January 24, 1999.

2. Provenance studies; see class, bulk Ni (wt.%) and/or the mole proportion of fayalite in olivine.

REFERENCES

GRAHAM, AL, BEVAN, AWR and HUTCHISON, R (1985) Catalogue of Meteorites. British Museum (Natural History), London, 4th edition, 460 pp.

TRAILL, RJ (1980) Catalogue of the National Meteorite Collection of Canada Revised to December 31, 1979. Geol. Surv. Canada Pap. 80­17, 19 pp.

WILSON, GC (1997) Recent meteoritics projects, including a compact catalogue of Canadian meteorites. IsoTrace Lab report, University of Toronto, 32 pp.

WILSON, GC and MENDELSOHN, J (1999) Coverage of Indian earth sciences in international bibliographic databases: GeoRef, GeoSEARCH and MINLIB. J. Geol. Soc. India 53, 17-26.