The Wedderburn iron meteorite, found in Victoria, Australia in 1951, is one of the most Nickel-rich irons known. During a re-investigation of a polished thick section of meteorite housed at University of California, Los Angeles, Chi Ma and Alan Rubin verified the presence of a new iron-carbide mineral. They named the new find edscottite in honor of Edward (Ed) R. D. Scott of University of Hawai‘i, USA, for his seminal contributions to meteorite research and for his identification of this iron-carbide in 1971.

Ma noted in a 2019 report to the Meteoritical Society that “during cooling from high temperature, edscottite (like cohenite and haxonite) forms metastably in iron meteorites in kamacite, but unlike the other two carbides it forms laths, possibly due to very rapid growth after supersaturation of carbon.”

Computational models suggest that Fe₃C, Fe₇C₃, and Fe₂C are the most stable iron-carbides under the pressures found in Earth’s inner core. Edscottite is close to stability at those extreme pressures and might be present.

Read more in Of Meteorites and Mines.