David Hole has tried just about everything. This was the last idea. Grasping the sledgehammer with both hands, he raised it above his head and let it fall down. A bang. But nothing happened. Not a single piece of stone chipped from the hammer. This is not normal, the man thought angrily. Six years later, he was proven right.
He ran into a large reddish boulder David Hole while hunting for gold near Maryborough Regional Park, where the Australian fever peaked in the 19th century and forgotten boulders of the precious metal can still be found here.
When he bent down to pick up the 39cm stone with one hand, he found it impossible. He was incredibly heavy.
“I was convinced it contained a large nugget of gold,” he confessed. He therefore took it home, where he tried to break it into smaller pieces using an angle grinder and a drill. When he withstood even the impact of the sledgehammer, he decided to give up.
“I put it on the shelf and didn’t remember it for six years. Only once did I notice an ad in the local paper for a Melbourne museum offering to identify stones. I believed that experts could advise me,” says Hole.
A strange stone
The moment he pulled the seventeen-kilogram boulder out of his backpack, geologists Dermot Henry and Bill Birch they couldn’t take their eyes off him.
“It had dimples on it that are typical of only one type of rock – a meteorite,” Henry says. “It is formed when a body passes through the atmosphere and its surface melts.”
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Meteorite at Maryborough. Credit Museums Victoria (Rod Start) – 2 / Museums Victoria
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Australian meteorite
Subsequent analysis confirmed that the stone, consisting of dense compounds of iron and nickel, did indeed come from space and is 4.6 billion years old.
When geologists cut it open with a super-hard diamond saw, they discovered that it also contained droplets of silicate minerals, called chondrules, which were formed from the super-hot cloud of gas that formed our solar system.
“About 4.6 billion years ago, our universe was literally littered with these pieces. They gradually clumped together under the influence of gravity to form Earth and the other rocky planets,” explains Bill Birch. “Their remains are found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. If they bump into each other from time to time, they can head all the way to our orbit.”
The Maryborough Meteorite
The Maryborough meteorite most likely met such a fate. When it entered our atmosphere, it heated up and the aforementioned dimples appeared on its surface. He then ended up in the Australian bush, where he waited for David Hole to discover him using a metal detector.
The lack of weathering on the rock indicates that this event occurred no more than 200 years ago.
Source: Youtube
According to geologists, the body is much rarer than gold. Its value is around 100 thousand dollars, roughly 2,200,000 CZK. In addition, it is the second heaviest meteorite ever found in Australia.
Resources: www.smh.com.au, www.museumsvictoria.com.au, www.mirror.co.uk
