In 1916, a French consular official reported discovering a giant “iron hill” deep in the Sahara desert, roughly 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Chinguetti, Mauritania—purportedly a meteorite (technically a mesosiderite) some 40 meters (130 toes) tall and 100 meters (330 toes) lengthy. He introduced again a small fragment, however the meteorite hasn’t been discovered once more since, regardless of the efforts of a number of expeditions, calling its very existence into query.
Three British researchers have carried out their very own evaluation and proposed a way of figuring out as soon as and for all whether or not the Chinguetti meteorite actually exists, detailing their findings in a brand new preprint posted to the physics arXiv. They contend that they’ve narrowed down the seemingly areas the place the meteorite might be buried beneath excessive sand dunes and are at present awaiting entry to information from a magnetometer survey of the area in hopes of both discovering the mysterious lacking meteorite or confirming that it seemingly by no means existed.
Captain Gaston Ripert was in cost of the Chinguetti camel corps. One day he overheard a dialog amongst the chameliers (camel drivers) about an uncommon iron hill in the desert. He satisfied a neighborhood chief to information him there one night time, taking Ripert on a 10-hour camel journey alongside a “disorienting” route, making just a few detours alongside the approach. He could even have been actually blindfolded, relying on how one interprets the French phrase en aveugle, which might imply both “blind” (i.e. with out a compass) or “blindfolded.” The 4-kilogram fragment Ripert collected was later analyzed by famous geologist Alfred Lacroix, who thought of it a big discovery. But when others did not find the bigger Chinguetti meteorite, folks began to doubt Ripert’s story.
“I do know that the normal opinion is that the stone doesn’t exist; that to some, I’m purely and easily an imposter who picked up a metallic specimen,” Ripert wrote to French naturalist Theodore Monod in 1934. “That to others, I’m a simpleton who mistook a sandstone outcrop for an unlimited meteorite. I shall do nothing to disabuse them, I do know solely what I noticed.”
Encouraged by a separate report of native blacksmiths claiming to get better iron from a giant block someplace east or southeast of Chinguetti, Monod intermittently looked for the meteorite a number of instances over the ensuing a long time, to no avail. A pilot named Jacques Gallouédec thought he noticed a darkish silhouette in the Saharan dunes in the Eighties. But neither Monod nor a second expedition in the late Nineties—documented by the UK’s Channel 4—may find something. Monod concluded in 1989 that Ripert had seemingly mistakenly recognized a sedimentary rock “with no hint of steel” as a meteorite.
Still, as Rutgers University physicist Matt Buckley famous on Bluesky, “This story has every part: giant unexplained meteorites, sand dunes, a man named Gaston, ductile nickel needles, secret aeromagnetic surveys, and camel drivers.” So naturally, it intrigued Stephen Warren of Imperial College London, Oxford University’s Ekaterini Protopapa, and Robert Warren, who started their very own seek for the mysterious lacking meteorite in 2020.