Weighing in excess of 60 tons, the Hoba Meteorite is currently the largest meteorite ever located. The Hoba Meteorite has never been moved, and currently located at the location of its 1920 discovery, the Hoba Farm near Grootfontein, Namibia. While the Hoba Meteorite was declared a National Monument by the Government of Namibia in 1955, tourism of the Hoba Meteorite wasn’t allowed until 1985.
According to reports, the farm’s owner discovered the meteorite by accident while plowing his fields and Jacobus Hermanus Brits soon arrived to excavate, name, and write a full report on The Hoba Meteorite, a report that is available in Namibia’s Grootfontein Museum as of 2009.
Hoba is considered a “tabloid body of metal”, classified as an ataxite iron meteorite, and is exactly 2.95 meters in length, 2.85 meters in width, and 1.75 meter in height. The meteorite belongs to the chemical class IVB, and is composed of 84% iron, 16% nickel, and 0.04% cobalt. To smaller degrees, phosphorus, carbon, sulphur, chromium, copper, zinc, gallium, germanium, and iridium all consist of Hoba’s natural makeup. Traces of Zinc, Gallium, Germanium, and Iridium. Iron hydroxides are present upon the meteorite’s surface, but this is due to weathering as these indentations are not natural to Hoba’s makeup.
The Hoba Meteorite is believed to be at least 190 million years old and to have crashed onto Earth’s surface at least 80,000 years ago. The Hoba Meteorite’s original weight was 66 tons, but decades of erosion, vandalism, and scientific sampling have left its weight at 60 tons.
Several things make the Hoba Meteorite unique, the most prevalent being Hoba’s lack of an impact crater. Scientists have theorized several reasons for this, such as the Hoba Meteorite being slowed by the Earth’s atmosphere to where it fell at terminal velocity and skidded into the ground as a result. However, no explanation for the Hoba Meteorite’s “crater-less” phenomena has been proven as fact. The Hoba Meteorite is also unique in that it is a cuboid meteorite with cleanly-flat surfaces, which also have defied true explanation by scientists.
All things considered, the Hoba Meteorite can easily be considered a natural wonder.