In January 1976 Mr. Ted Dowie was looking for gold in a river in the mining district of Dunganville near Greymouth when he came across an unusual looking black, smooth-topped boulder in a dry creek bed. It rang like a bell when he hit it and was unusually heavy. Intrigued, he rolled the boulder up on the stream bank and sent a small sample he had chipped off to New Zealand Geological Survey.
Walking to get to the search site Photo: RNZ / Claire Concannon
Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeartRADIO, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Mr. Dowie had found a 50.2kg iron meteorite, still the largest of the nine recorded meteorite finds in New Zealand to date.
This week Claire Concannon joins Dr. James Scott and students from the geology department at the University of Otago as they follow in the footsteps of Mr. Dowie.
Using clues from a report about the initial find, and equipped with metal detectors, the team hope to discover a left-over piece of this meteorite - an iron core of a protoplanet from the time of the formation of our solar system.
The meteorite hunting team. From L-R: Daniel Burgin, Dr. James Scott, Julia Burns, Felix Schmidt, Dr. Marshall Palmer, Thomas Stevenson, Nadine Cooper and Eve Aitken. Photo: RNZ / Claire Concannon
To learn more:
- Read the 1984 paper that describes the Dunganville meteor here.
- Find out more about the recorded New Zealand meteorite falls and finds on the Te Ara website.
Thanks to GNS Science, Te Pū Ao, for providing fragments of the Dunganville meteorite for XRF testing.
