Ahnighito, the Cape York Meteorite
Fell about 10,000 years ago; brought to New York in 1897
In the centre of the Hall of Meteorites rests a pitted mass of dark metal the size of a small car and the weight of six elephants. This is Ahnighito, the largest fragment of the Cape York meteorite and the largest meteorite on display in any museum in the world. It fell on northwest Greenland thousands of years ago, one of several pieces of a single iron body that broke up in the atmosphere. You are encouraged to touch it, and most visitors do, laying a hand on metal that formed in the core of a small planet more than four and a half billion years ago.
Look at the surface. The hollows and scoops were carved when the outer layers melted in flight, and the rusty patches show where the iron has reacted with New York's humid air. Where a section has been cut and polished elsewhere in the hall, you can see the crystalline pattern of interlocking bands, called the Widmanstätten structure, that forms only when an iron nickel alloy cools over millions of years in the vacuum of space. Ahnighito is so heavy that its supports go through the floor and are anchored in the bedrock beneath the building.
For centuries the Inuit of the region used the meteorite as a source of iron for knives and harpoon tips, chipping flakes from it with stones. In the 1890s the explorer Robert Peary persuaded local guides to lead him to it, and after three summers of effort he shipped it and two smaller pieces to New York and sold them to the museum. The name comes from the Inuit word for the tent shaped mass, and Peary's daughter Marie, born in Greenland, was called Ahnighito too.
Did You Know? Ahnighito is the heaviest object in the museum, and the floor beneath it was reinforced down to the bedrock of Manhattan to bear its weight.
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