It was the monumental force of the asteroid's impact — traveling at approximately 10 miles-per-second — that resulted in its nickel-iron matrix being melted and injected with an immense burst of pressure into the graphite, fully penetrating the cracks and fissures. Exquisitely ornamental, this is an extraordinary artifact of a cataclysmic collision frozen in time, recently estimated to have happened 4 billion years ago (<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/maps.13464" rel="noreferrer nofollow">Meteoritics</a>, April 2020). Canyon Diablo meteorites are renowned for containing these graphite nodules, oblong inclusions of graphite scattered throughout the metallic matrix.

The well-preserved Meteor Crater in Arizona formed in a fraction of a second 50,000 years ago as 175 million tons of limestone and bedrock were uplifted, forming the mile-wide crater rim in the formerly flat terrain. The meteorite was only 150 ft. wide but created a 40-megaton blast, destroying 99.999% of the half-million ton mass and creating a spectacular crater. The Canyon Diablo remains were discovered in 1918, and led to mining attempts to find the missing iron mass for the booming railway industry.

This space graphite somehow demonstrates unexpected magnetic properties. See Nature paper in comments below, and "Canyon Diablo is classified as a silicate-bearing IAB iron . The origin of this group is puzzling, but it may have involved catastrophic mixing of the molten iron core of an asteroid in a collision with a chondritic body in the first few million years of the Solar System" and the conclusion: "The implications of ferromagnetic carbon, whatever its origin, are likely to be wide- reaching—this material could be a zero-gap, high-temperature, ferromagnetic semiconductor. With this new sighting of strongly ferromagnetic meteoritic carbon, we look forward to rapid developments in the area of carbon-based magnetism."