(Museums Victoria) Posted on 11/30/2021 6:33:43 AM PST by Red Badger
(Museums Victoria)
In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.
Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.
To break open his find, Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even dousing the thing in acid. However, not even a sledgehammer could make a crack. That's because what he was trying so hard to open was no gold nugget. As he found out years later, it was a rare meteorite.
"It had this sculpted, dimpled look to it," Melbourne museum geologist Dermot Henry told The Sydney Morning Herald.
"That's formed when they come through the atmosphere, they are melting on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them."
Unable to open the 'rock', but still intrigued, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification.
"I've looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites," Henry told Channel 10 News.
In fact, after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, Henry explains only two of the offerings have ever turned out to be real meteorites.
This was one of the two.
(Melbourne Museum)
"If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," another Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch, told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.
The researchers published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they've called Maryborough after the town near where it was found.
It's a huge 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut off a small slice, they discovered its composition has a high percentage of iron, making it a H5 ordinary chondrite.
Once open, you can also see the tiny crystallized droplets of metallic minerals throughout it, called chondrules.
"Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time, providing clues to the age, formation and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth)," said Henry.
"Some provide a glimpse at the deep interior of our planet. In some meteorites, there is 'stardust' even older than our Solar System, which shows us how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table.
"Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life."
(Birch et al., PRSV, 2019)
Although the researchers don't yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it may have been on Earth, they do have some guesses.
Our Solar System was once a spinning pile of dust and chondrite rocks. Eventually gravity pulled a lot of this material together into planets, but the leftovers mostly ended up in a huge asteroid belt.
"This particular meteorite most probably comes out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's been nudged out of there by some asteroids smashing into each other, then one day it smashes into Earth," Henry told Channel 10 News.
Carbon dating suggests the meteorite has been on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years, and there's been a number of meteor sightings between 1889 and 1951 that could correspond to its arrival on our planet.
The researchers argue that the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold, making it far more valuable to science. It's one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and it's the second largest chondritic mass, after a huge 55-kilogram specimen identified in 2003.
"This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, whereas there's been thousands of gold nuggets found," Henry told Channel 10 News.
"Looking at the chain of events, it's quite, you might say, astronomical it being discovered at all."
It's not even the first meteorite to take a few years to make it to a museum. In a particularly amazing story ScienceAlert covered in 2018, one space rock took 80 years, two owners, and a stint as a doorstop before finally being revealed for what it truly was.
Now is probably as good a time as any to check your backyard for particularly heavy and hard-to-break rocks – you might be sitting on a metaphorical gold mine.
The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria.
A version of this article was originally published in July 2019.
Ping!...................
So, how much is it worth?
1088 ounces of gold would be worth about $1.3 million, or so.
What did it sell for. Gold at least has a cash value.
If it’s worth more than gold, how much did the scientists pay him for it, or do they just simply take it?
Maybe Fauci told them he was science, after all, and one shouldn’t question him/it.
Was this a Mel Brooks movie?
If this had happened recently, I’m sure under Australia COVID law the museum would take possession of rock without any compensation to the finder.
Even old Mel couldn’t come up with this storyline!...............
All he had to do was to put a magnet on it
If it had happened in the UK, all valuable finds belong to the Crown...............
Forwarded to my geologist cousin who is a consultant for a gold mine. Maybe he’s looking for the wrong stuff.
......or water...............
In very rough terms, the math in my head, it looks like about $150 per pound for iron, and up to a thousand times more for rarer mineral mixes. Given the rarity as described, I’m going to speculate that it’s easily more than an equivalent amount of gold. http://www.meteorlab.com/METEORLAB2001dev/pricing.htm
LOL, beat me to it!
I recall seeing a meteorite exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in the late 70’s.
One meteorite from somewhere in South America had been meticulously cut/carved/polished into a wrench...It was odd to look at with it’s dark hue and specks of ‘shiny bits’ - also it was not offset which to my mechanical mind still bugs me to this day...
Love the image of the guy beating the thing with a sledgehammer. Very 2001 Space Odyssey of him.
I found a rock that looked just like that, only twice as big and too heavy for me to carry home. Story of my life. 🙂
Thanks Red Badger. Nice find!
$10 per gram would be $170,000. As larger meteorites go for more per gram, it would possibly go for $50 per gram, which would $850,000.
I would not expect it to go for more, because it is not flashy or obviously, visually, meteoric.
But large, intact meteorites such as this are very rare. An auction would determine the real value.
The above is based on a few minutes researching the subject on the internet.
So the museum glommed onto the meteorite and kept it. And ol’ Dave got bupkiss! They didn’t even name it after him. But to name it the “D.Hole Meteorite” would not have lent it much shine or sizzle, would it? Good thing his birth name wasn’t Alfred, though.
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