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- Date of falling about 5 thousand years ago
- Date of finding November 12, 1914
- Place of discovery Morasko near Poznań (currently within the borders of the city)
- Dimensions height: 38 cm, diameter: 32 cm, weight: 71.8 kg
- ID no. ZNG PAN B-V-57/28.1
- Museum The Geological Museum of the Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences
- Availability till the end of November 2014 on the exhibition “Morasko Meteorite the 100 anniversary of the discovery”
- Subjects nature, excavated from the earth
- Material rock
- Object copyright The Geological Museum of the Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences
- Digital images copyright public domain
- Digitalisation RDW MIC, Małopolska's Virtual Museums project
- Tags cosmos , mineral , meteorite , 3D plus , WMM Plus , public domain
The story of its discovery started in the area of Morasko village (at present, a district of Poznań) in 1914. During works connected with digging trenches for Prussian soldiers, Dr. Cobliner, the sergeant, found a heavy and rusty lump of iron in the ground, which weighed about 78 kilograms. The find was handed over to the Astronomical Observatory in Spandau near Berlin, where it was examined.
more The Morasko meteorite fell about five thousand years ago during the biggest rain of iron meteorites. The ellipse shaped spread was a few kilometres long, and it ranged from the north to the west and from the north-west to the south-east.
The story of its discovery started in the area of Morasko village (at present, a district of Poznań) in 1914. During works connected with digging trenches for Prussian soldiers, Dr Cobliner, the sergeant, found a heavy and rusty lump of iron in the ground, which weighed about 78 kilograms. The find was handed over to the Astronomical Observatory in Spandau near Berlin, where it was examined. During the examination, it was found to be an iron meteorite (rudaceous octahedrite). More of the meteorite's fragments were discovered in the interwar period.
In the years 1950–55, a search for other fragments was carried out among the local population. Another fragment was found then. It weighed 78 kilograms and was discovered by a farmer Józef Oleksy during ploughing works in 1947. Then, hollows were noticed in the ground located near those places where other fragments of the meteorite had been found.
In the 1970s, the hollows were examined in detail, and a hypothesis was formulated about their meteoric origin. The group of seven craters, located in the area of 55 hectares, was recognised as a nature reserve in 1976. It is worth mentioning that the Morasko Meteorite nature reserve is one of fourteen such places on Earth, where extraterrestrial matter is presented, along with results of its fall.
In the 1990s, studies on the Morasko meteorite were intensified. They were carried out by the Institute of Geology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and their results were published in both national and international publications. In September 2006, Krzysztof Socha, a meteorite searcher of Kielce, found another fragment of this meteorite (he called it Rudy [Russet]). After removing pollutants, it weighed 164 kilograms. In 2012, the meteorite searchers Magdalena Skórzewska and Łukasz Smuła located one more fragment of the meteorite. When it was extracted, the block weighed 300 kilograms. Once it was cleansed and conserved, it weighed 261 kilograms. At present, it is the biggest fragment of the Morasko meteorite found in Central Europe (it is estimated that more than 150 of blocks and lumps were found so far, of a total weight of almost 2 tons).
Elaborated by Barbara Kietlińska-Michalik (The Geological Museum of the Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences), editorial team of Małopolska’s Virtual Museums, © all rights reserved
Bibliography:
Największy deszcz meteorytów żelaznych w Europie Środkowej, ed. Andrzej Muszyński, Poznań 2012,
Jerzy Pokrzywnicki, I. Meteoryty Polski. II. Katalog meteorytów w zbiorach polskich, "Studia Geologica Polonica", XV (1964).
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