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Earth's 9 Heaviest Meteorites

Counting down by mass — and the one at the top is so heavy that nobody has ever managed to move it.

Photo: Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart, CC BY 4.0

9. Mundrabilla, Australia

12.4 tonnes, located in 1966 on the treeless Nullarbor Plain. It is loaded with iron sulfide, which makes it unusually crumbly for a giant iron.

Photo: Krigore, CC BY-SA 4.0

8. Chupaderos, Mexico

14.1 tonnes, found in Chihuahua in 1852 beside a second 6.8-tonne mass. Both are pieces of one body that split apart on the way down.

Photo: Thelmadatter, CC BY-SA 3.0

7. Willamette, USA

14.15 tonnes, found in Oregon in 1902 with no crater anywhere near it. Ice Age floods are thought to have rafted it there inside a chunk of ice.

Photo: Vicpeters, CC BY 4.0

6. Mbosi, Tanzania

16 tonnes and lying in the Mbeya highlands with no crater at all. Soil was later dug away from around it so visitors can see the whole mass.

Photo: Christiaan Zeelenberg, CC BY-SA 2.0

5. Bacubirito, Mexico

22 tonnes, unearthed in Sinaloa in 1863. It is roughly four metres from end to end, which makes it one of the longest single meteorites known.

Photo: saxxon57, CC BY-SA 2.0

4. Aletai, China

28 tonnes, known as Armanty. Its fragments turned up along a line more than 400 km long in Xinjiang — the longest iron strewn field ever mapped.

Photo: jun jin luo, CC BY 3.0

3. Campo del Cielo, Argentina

30.8 tonnes for the Gancedo mass, dug up in 2016. It came from a fall about 4,000 years ago that punched a whole field of craters into the plain.

2. Cape York, Greenland

30.9 tonnes. Inuit hunters worked iron from it into knives and harpoon tips for centuries before it was shipped to New York in 1897.

Photo: Matt Mechtley, CC BY-SA 2.0

1. Hoba, Namibia

About 60 tonnes — roughly ten elephants. It has never been moved, and it left no crater, so it likely came in at a shallow angle and slowed right down.

Photo: Olga Ernst, CC BY-SA 4.0

Why They Are All Iron

Every meteorite on this list is a nickel-iron mass. Stony ones shatter on impact and rust away in the ground, so only the metal giants survive to be weighed.

Photo: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC BY-SA 4.0
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