As you may have read, Siberians are rushing out to look for bits of the meteor that exploded there a week ago Friday, in hopes of selling them for a lot of money. (I blogged about that meteor, as well as the one from 1908, here.)
The heaviest meteorite ever moved by humans is now sitting on the ground floor of the American Museum of Natural History. The 34 ton iron rock is so heavy, it has to stand on supports that reach all the way into the bedrock below the museum. It’s called the “Ahnighito”, or the “Cape York Meteorite,” and it was sold to the museum by none other than the famous Arctic explorer, Robert E. Peary.
He excavated three stones from Savissivik, Greenland, after coaxing the local Inuits to show him where to find them. (It took some doing to convince them. In his account, he calls them “Eskimos” and, elsewhere, “a little family of Arctic aborigines.” Shudder.) You can read his firsthand account of that expedition here. You can also read a previous post of mine about Peary and Henson and what the Inuits taught them about Arctic-wear here.
One of the meteorites weighed about 5,500 pounds, another about 1100 pounds. These he arranged to have excavated and moved using hydraulic jacks to dislodge them, then ferried across water on a seven foot thick ice raft.
But removing the monster, the Ahnighito, was a different story. It had collided with the Earth 10,000 years ago. For centuries, the Inuit had chipped off pieces of iron from all the meteorites for metal tools and harpoons.
Peary enlisted “all the able-bodied men of the village” to work for him excavating and transporting the monster onto his ship. I’m pretty sure he didn’t give them any money. But he did pay them with “guns, knives, ammunition, and other articles which I had brought to reward them for their faithful service.” What’s not clear in his account is how the Inuits felt about having their sources of iron removed. Peary sold the meteorites to the American Museum of Natural History for $40,000.
How did they move a 34 ton iron rock? They dislodged it with massive hydraulic jacks. Then they laboriously moved it on rails, rolled it down a hill, and built more rails to get it to water’s edge. It took a few tries–he had to abandon the rock near the water’s edge, for fear of his ship being damaged, returning the following spring.
They needed a big ship. To get it on board . . . well, here’s Peary’s description. You don’t have to read it too closely. If you just scan it, you’ll get the idea. (But if you want to read his account in full, you can do so here.)
He keeps going, but you get the idea. Once on board the ship, the iron rock made the ship’s compasses go haywire. But they arrived safely at New York–here are more pictures, courtesy of the digital history project website.
