Man found a Rock from Mine thinking it's gold; But It Turned Out to Be Far More Valuable // servicebloggers.com

Published: Nov 2019

In 2015, David Hole was a gold digger one fine day he was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Surveying the area with metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary rocks. A very heavy, reddish rock resting beneath clay and mud.

He took it home and tried everything to open it, He thought that there was a gold nugget inside the rock, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.

To crack open his finding, David Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, even putting the rock in acid, but nothing happened. He does not wanted to share anything about this so he hide it. That's because he was sure that its gold as he found some yellowish sediments around the rock. what he was trying so hard to open was actually not a gold nugget. As he found out years later, it was a rare meteorite.

"That's formed when they descend through the atmosphere, the chondrite were melted on the outside, and the atmosphere sculpts them."

Unable to open the 'rock', but still intrigued, David Hole took the meteorite into the Melbourne Museum to be identified.

Mr. Henry explains "I've looked at a lot of rocks that people think are meteorites,"

In fact, after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, only two of the offerings have ever turned out to be real meteorites.

This was one of the two.

"If you saw a rock on Earth like this, and you picked it up, it shouldn't be that heavy," said another Melbourne Museum geologist, Bill Birch.

The researchers have recently published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which they've called Maryborough after the town near where it was found.

It's a huge 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds), and after using a diamond saw to cut off a small slice, they discovered its composition has a high percentage of iron, making it a H5 ordinary chondrite.
Once open, you can also see the tiny crystallised droplets of metallic minerals throughout it, called chondrules.

"Meteorites provide the cheapest form of space exploration. They transport us back in time, providing clues to the age, formation and chemistry of our Solar System (including Earth),"

"Some provide a glimpse at the deep interior of our planet. In some meteorites, there is 'stardust' even older than our Solar System, which shows us how stars form and evolve to create elements of the periodic table.

"Other rare meteorites contain organic molecules such as amino acids; the building blocks of life."

Although the researchers don't yet know where the meteorite came from and how long it may have been on Earth, they do have some guesses.

Our Solar System was once a spinning pile of dust and chondrite rocks. Eventually gravity pulled a lot of this material together into planets, but the leftovers mostly ended up in a huge asteroid belt.

"This particular meteorite most probably comes out of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it's been nudged out of there by some asteroids smashing into each other, then one day it smashes into Earth,"

Carbon dating suggests the meteorite has been on Earth between 100 and 1,000 years, and there's been a number of meteor sightings between 1889 and 1951 that could correspond to its arrival on our planet.

The researchers argue that the Maryborough meteorite is much rarer than gold. It's one of only 17 meteorites ever recorded in the Australian state of Victoria, and it's the second largest chondritic mass, after a huge 55-kilogram specimen identified in 2003.

"This is only the 17th meteorite found in Victoria, whereas there's been thousands of gold nuggets found,"
"Looking at the chain of events, it's quite, you might say, astronomical it being discovered at all."

It's not even the first meteorite to take a few years to make it to a museum. In a particular amazing story we covered last year, one space rock took 80 years, two owners, and a stint as a doorstop before making it to a museum.

Now you might dream of being sitting on a metaphorical gold mine or your house was built on top of it !!!