I picked up some unusual travelling literature on a recent trip through Namibia, a book called ‘Faraway Sandy Trails’ written by Lily Marion Newton more than sixty years ago. It gave me the opportunity to compare routes and find amusing and interesting anecdotes about the country and the days of travel before tourism and tar roads.
This time I followed her steps to the Hoba Meteorite near Grootfontein. When Lily and her husband Charles visited the Hoba West farm all those years ago, they nearly missed the meteorite because of the trees and bushes growing around it that obscured it from view. Since then, the surrounding bush and sand have been cleared and a small amphitheatre has been built. In 1955 it was declared a national monument to protect it from vandalism.
The sixty-ton meteorite was found by Jacobus Hermanus Brits on the Hoba West farm in 1920 when he came across the conspicuous black rock while ploughing his fields. When a sample was examined, the rock was found to comprise 82.4% iron, 16.4% nickel, 0.76% cobalt and traces of other minerals. It was determined that it fell to Earth about 80 000 years ago. The meteorite is considered to be the largest single meteorite known in the world today at 2.95 x 2.84 metres.
Interestingly, Hoba is the Khoekhoegowab word for ‘gift’, an apt name for this large gift from outer space.
A meteorite can be an asteroid or debris from an object like a comet that survives its passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and its impact with the Earth’s surface. This is no mean feat as meteorites can hit the Earth’s atmosphere travelling at about 90 000 kilometres an hour! When it enters the atmosphere, friction, pressure and chemical interactions cause the surface of the meteorite to heat up and vaporise. The plume of hot gas and meteorite material is electrically charged and glows brightly, visible to us Earthlings far below and referred to as a ‘shooting star’. Most meteors disintegrate shortly after entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
Namibia is also known for the Gibeon Meteorite Shower, the most extensive meteorite shower known on the planet, estimated to have occurred over an area of 20 000km² and fallen to the Earth in prehistoric times.
Paging through Faraway Sandy Trails, I read Lily’s words that still accurately describe the Hoba Meteorite. ‘This stranger from space is like a great square-shaped mass of black rock, uneven and pitted . . . ’, she wrote. She suggested to her husband that ‘instead of hitching her wagon to a star she would stand on one and see if anything exciting would happen’. But he, apparently, wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea and continued examining the interesting ground around it, muttering about clumsiness and falling off as she climbed aboard.
I couldn’t resist doing the same. It’s not every day that you get the opportunity to catch a ride on a shooting star, after all. There was no one around, just the big blue sky, the trees and bushes, and melodic birdsong. I stretched out in the warm Namibian sunshine, thinking about the vast solar system that extends from our beautiful blue-and-green planet, grateful to be here.
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