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The orientation of Widmanstetter figures in a random section

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2018

Sidney Melmore*
Affiliation:
The Yorkshire Museum, York

Extract

The problem of determining the orientation of Widmanstetter figures has recently arisen in a paper by Dr. L. J. Spencer on the Gibeon shower of meteoritic irons in South-West Africa: the method of attacking it to be described here will be applied to the crystals illustrated in plate II of his paper.

By producing the faces of a regular octahedron in all possible directions a set of six congruent prisms is formed, as shown in fig. 1. The Widmanstetter figures are the traces of these prisms in a plane of section. The section across any one of the prisms by a plane normal to its axis is a rhomb whose angles are those of a face of the rhombic-dodecahedron, that is to say, 70° 31′ and 109° 28′.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1942

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References

Note

page 167 note 1 Spencer, L. J., Min. Mag., 1941, vol. 26, p. 19, pls. I, II.CrossRefGoogle Scholar