The five biggest meteor crashes of all time

The meteorite collided with Earth nearly 10,000 years ago. The iron masses were known to Inuit as Ahnighito (the Tent), weighing 31 metric tons (31 long tons; 34 short tons); the Woman, weighing 3 metric tons (3.0 long tons; 3.3 short tons); and the Dog, weighing 400 kilograms (880 lb).[2] For centuries, Inuit living near the meteorites used them as a source of metal for tools and harpoons.[3][4] The Inuit would work the metal using cold forging—that is, by stamping and hammering it.The first stories of its existence reached scientific circles in 1818. Five expeditions between 1818 and 1883 failed to find the source of the iron. It was located in 1894 by Robert E. Peary, the famous American Navy Arctic explorer. Peary enlisted the help of a local Inuit guide, who brought him to Saviksoah Island, just off northern Greenland's Cape York in 1894. It took Peary three years to arrange and carry out the loading of the heavy iron meteorites onto ships.

The layout of the impact area suggests that the body fell at a shallow angle, and was moving at typical meteorite entry speeds of 40,000 to 60,000 km/h. Its total mass was more than 3,500 tonnes. The shallow angle presented the body with more air resistance than it would have encountered at a steeper angle, and it broke up in the air into at least four pieces before impact. The biggest piece struck with an explosion roughly equivalent to the atom bomb that levelled Hiroshima.

Dating the impact event[edit]Fission-track analysis of glass fragments by Storzer (1965) suggested the Wabar impact took place thousands of years ago, but delicate glass filigree, and the fact that the craters have been filled-in considerably since Philby's 1932 visit, suggests their origin is much more recent. Thermoluminescence dating by Prescott et al. (2004)[9] suggest the impact site is less than 250 years old. This is consistent with Arab reports of a fireball passing over Riyadh, variously reported as occurring in 1863 or 1891 and heading southeast, reported in Philby's book "Empty Quarter" (1933).

Philby had heard of Bedouin legends of an area called Al Hadida ("place of iron" in Arabic) with ruins of ancient habitations, and also an area where a piece of iron the size of a camel had been found, and so organized an expedition to visit the site. After a month's journey through wastes so harsh that even some of the camels died, on 2 February 1932 Philby arrived at a patch of ground about a half a square kilometre in size, littered with chunks of white sandstone, black glass, and chunks of iron meteorite.