Silver Twenty Grams 2012 Seymchan Meteorite, Coin from Cook Islands - detailed information

The Cook Islands, a sovereign state in free association with New Zealand, uses two official legal tender currencies. The New Zealand Dollar circulates in parallel with the local Cook Islands Dollar; at the same time, the government also authorises many legal tender coins in the Cook Islands Dollar currency for collector's purposes.

Collector coins are dedicated to historical or general popular culture themes not related to the country itself. Many of them are in bullion sizes based on the troy ounce, but some are "metric", like twenty grams (20g) of silver.

This coin featuring the Seymchan Meteorite is part of the Meteorite Impacts collection which is issued in a number of different countries; all coins in it have an embedded original piece of the specific meteorite.

Seymchan is a pallasite meteorite found in the dry bed of the river Hekandue in the Magadan district, Russia, near the settlement of Seymchan, in June 1967.

The main mass of 272.3 kilograms was found during a survey in June 1967 by geologist F. A. Mednikov. The mass was a triangular-shaped thumbprinted meteorite lying among the stones of the brook bed. A second specimen of 51 kilograms was found with a mine detector at a distance of 20 m from the first in October 1967 by I. H. Markov. The main mass was turned over to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. During a new expedition in 2004, Dmitri Kachalin recovered about 50 kilograms of new material.