Meteorites-records

The biggest meteorites

Of all meteorites the biggest and heaviest are iron meteorites. The main reason is that iron meteorites are more stable than stony- iron- or stony meteorites, these normally burst while entering the atmosphere and then go down as a meteorite shower. The following hitlist shows the giants of the respective meteorite types, but here not the total weight of all fragments of the respective falls or finds were considered, but rather the weight of the respectively largest piece:

Iron-meteorites

Stony-iron-meteorites

Stony-meteorites

The largest meteorite showers

As said before: Not all meteorites make their way to Earth in one piece. Many burst in the upper atmosphere and thus produce real meteorite showers, of which sometimes only a couple of pieces fall to ground, while at other times it can come to a proverbial stone rain of many thousands of meteorites. Now follows our hitliste of the most sensational meteorite showers of all times:

Observed meteorite showers

Important prehistoric strewnfields

The oldest meteorites

When we talk here about the oldest meteorites, we don't talk about the absolute age of the meteorites- most of them already came to existence at the time of the origin of our solar system, about 4,6 billions years ago, and since then more or less have remained unchanged in the airless space of the universe! Here we talk about the terrestrial age, which is the time that these meteorites have existed after their fall on our earth. Most of the meteorites weather in the oxidizing milieu of the earth, through air and water, quite quickly, and there are iron meteorites that can almost be watched while they are rusting. Fortunately however some meteorites fell quite favorably- e.g. in the perpetual ice of the Antarctica or the deserts of the earth - and so could last for biblical ages of many millenniums. Nevertheless here and there are finds of so-called "fossil meteorites" exceeding them many times:

Absolute recordkeeper is the meteorite of Osterplana, Sweden, found in 1987 like a fossil embedded in chalk stone. The chalk stone is from the geological era of the ordoviziom and therefore certified the meteorite a terrestrial age of almost incredible 480 millions years! Thus surpasses the meteorite of Brunflo, found in 1980 also embedded in swedish chalk stone, with roundabout 30 million years. Both meteorites are stony meteorites out of the class of the chondrites - and only the chondritic structure is revealing the extraterrestial origin of the finds. As in fossils, a material exchange in the course of millions of years led to a "fossilization", an assimilation to the earthly milieu so that all extraterrestial minerals were transformed into earthly ones.

The oldest "intact" meteorite, that kept both its cosmic structure as well as its original chemical structure, maybe is the iron meteorite of Lake Murray. In 1933 an about 250 kg heavy nickle-iron chunk was discovered in a crevice, that was embedded over many millions of years in the surrounding chalk-sandstone. An age determination of the chalk-sandstone and the crust of the meteorite yielded a sensational result: Lake Murray must have alreadyfallen on earth in the chalk time, about 110 million years ago, at an era when our world was still controlled by dinosaurs!