950 gms. Campo del Cielo,beautiful specimen (02/12/2011)

Home > Worthopedia – Price Guide > Natural History >

950 gms. Campo del Cielo,beautiful specimen

Terms and Conditions for using our site

950 gms. Campo del Cielo,beautiful specimen

Sold For:

or Sign In to see what it's worth.

Sold Date: 02/12/2011
Channel: Online Auction
Source: eBay
Category: Natural History

950 gms . B eautiful Specimen

I have over 12 years, an exhibitor at the Tucson Mineral Show, where meteor selling authentic quality, stabilized non corroccion, Buy with Confidence .. Buy insurance, the best expecimenes
Market., Authentic sculptures of the Universe.

if you have a question feel free to comment, I am happy to answer

Brief history of Campo del Cielo Meteorite

In 1576, the governor of a province in Northern Argentina commissioned the military to search for a huge mass of iron, which he had heard that Indians used for their weapons. The Indians claimed that the mass had fallen from the sky in a place they called Piguem Nonralta which the Spanish translated as Campo del Cielo ("Field of the Sky"). The expedition found a large mass of metal protruding out of the soil. They assumed it was an iron mine and brought back a few samples, which were described as being of unusual purity. The governor documented the expedition and deposited the report in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville , but it was quickly forgotten and later reports on that area merely repeated the Indian legends. Following the legends, in 1774 don Bartolome Francisco de Maguna rediscovered the iron mass which he called el Meson de Fierro ("the Table of Iron"). Maguna thought the mass was the tip of an iron vein. The next expedition, led by Rubin de Celis in 1783, used explosives to clear the ground around the mass and found that it was probably a single stone. Celis estimated its mass as 15 tonnes and abandoned it as worthless. He himself did not believe that the stone had fallen from the sky and assumed that it had formed by a volcanic eruption. However, he sent the samples to the Royal Society of London and published his report in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society . Those samples were later analyzed and found to contain 90% iron and 10% nickel and assigned to a meteoritic origin.

Later, many iron pieces were found in the area weighing from a few milligrams to 34 tonnes. A mass of about 1000 kg known as Otumpa was located in 1803. Its larger part of about 634 kg was brought in 1813 to Buenos Aires and later donated to the British Museum. Other large fragments are summarized in the table below. The mass called el Taco was originally 3070 kg, but the largest remaining fragment weighs 1998 kg.

Campo del Cielo Location of Campo del Cielo craters

The largest mass of 37000 kg was located in 1969 at a depth of 5 m using a metal detector. [3 ] This stone, named El Chaco , is the second heaviest single-piece meteorite after the Hoba meteorite ( Namibia ) which weighs 60 tonnes. However, the total mass of the Campo del Cielo fragments found so far exceeds 60 tonnes, making it the heaviest meteorite ever recovered on Earth.

In 1990 a local Argentinean highway police officer foiled a plot by Robert Haag to steal El Chaco .

The stone had already been moved out of the country, but was returned to Campo del Cielo and is now protected by a provincial law.

The meteorite impact, age and composition

A crater field of at least 26 craters was found in the area, with the largest being 115×91 meters. The field covered an area of 3×19 kilometers with an associated strewn area of smaller meteorites extending further by about 60 km. At least two of the craters contained thousands of small iron pieces. Such an unusual distribution suggests that a large body entered the Earth's atmosphere and broke into pieces which fell to the ground. The size of the main body is estimated as larger than 4 meters in diameter. The fragments contain an unusually high density of inclusions for an iron meteorite, which might have facilitated the disintegration of the original meteorite. Samples of charred wood were taken from beneath the meteorite fragments and analyzed for carbon-14 composition.

The results indicate the date of the fall to be around 4,200–4,700 years ago, or 2,200–2,700 years BC.

The average composition of the Campo del Cielo meteorites is 6....