In 1916, French consular officials reported discovering a gigantic “iron hill” deep in the Sahara desert, about 45 kilometers from Chinguetti. mauritania— Reportedly a meteorite (technically mesosiderite) is approximately 40 meters (130 feet) high and 100 meters (330 feet) long. He brought back small fragments, but despite the efforts of multiple expeditions, the meteorite has not been found again since then, and its very existence has been called into question.
Three British researchers carried out their own analysis, Chinguetti meteorite It actually exists, and the details of its discovery are described in a new book Preprint posted Physics to arXiv. They have narrowed down the location where the meteorite may be buried beneath high sand dunes, and are now looking to discover the mysteriously missing meteorite, or perhaps confirm that it never existed. It claims it is awaiting access to data from a magnetometer survey of the area. .
Captain Gaston Lippert commanded the Chinguetti Camel Corps. One day, he overheard a conversation among camel drivers about a rare iron hill in the desert. He persuades a local chieftain to guide him there one night, and takes Mr. Lippert on a camel ride for 10 hours along a “disorienting” route, making several stops along the way. I took a detour.Depending on how you interpret the French phrase, he may have literally been blindfolded. Anne Voegle, which means either “blind” (i.e. without a compass) or “blindfolded”. His four kilograms of debris, collected by Lippert, were later analyzed by a prominent geologist. Alfred Lacroix, he considered it an important discovery. However, when others failed to discover the larger Chinguetti meteorite, people began to doubt Lippert’s story.
“I know that the general opinion is that the stone doesn’t exist. To some people, I’m just a total fraud who picked up a metal specimen,” Lippert wrote in 1934, when he arrived in France. He wrote to the naturalist Théodore Monod. “I’m a simple person who mistook sandstone outcrops for giant meteorites. I won’t do anything to exploit them, I only know what I saw.”
encouraged separate report Mr. Monod searched for the meteorite several times intermittently over the next few decades, enlisting local blacksmiths who claimed to have recovered the iron from a huge mass somewhere east or southeast of Chinguetti, but to no avail. was. In the 1980s, a pilot named Jack Garoedec thought he spotted a dark figure in the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert. But neither Monod nor his second expedition in the late 1990s, recorded on Britain’s Channel 4, were able to find anything. Dr. Monod concluded in 1989 that Mr. Lippert likely misidentified sedimentary rock with “no traces of metal” as a meteorite.
Still, says Matt Buckley, a physicist at Rutgers University. Featured in Blue Sky“This story has it all: a gigantic meteorite of unknown origin, a sand dune, a man named Gaston, a ductile nickel needle, a secret aeromagnetic survey, and a camel driver.” It’s no wonder that Stephen Warren of Imperial College London, Ekaterini Protopapa of the University of Oxford, and Robert Warren, who launched his own search for the mysterious missing meteorite in 2020, were intrigued. .
