Qualla: Hoba Meteorite

Hoba Meteorite: Introduction

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sergio Conti from Montevecchia (LC), Italia, CC BY-SA 2.0. In Khoekhoegowab, the language of the Khoekhoe people, hoba means "gift." The name is apt. Somewhere between 80,000 and perhaps much less than 80,000 years ago, a slab of iron and nickel weighing more than 60 tonnes slammed into what is now a farm called Hoba West, near the town of Grootfontein in Namibia's Otjozondjupa Region. It left no crater. It has never been moved. And it remains, to this day, the largest known meteorite on Earth's surface -- roughly twice the mass of the next largest fragments, the 31-tonne Ahnighito of Greenland's Cape York meteorite and the 31-tonne Gancedo from Argentina's Campo del Cielo.

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Image: Sergio Conti from Montevecchia (LC), Italia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hoba Meteorite: A Gentle Arrival

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Dickert, CC BY-SA 3.0. The absence of a crater is the first puzzle. A 60-tonne mass arriving from space should gouge the earth. But the Hoba meteorite is unusually flat on both major surfaces, shaped more like a thick tabletop than a boulder. Scientists believe Earth's atmosphere slowed this flat profi...

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Image: Frank Dickert | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hoba Meteorite: The Accidental Discovery

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GIRAUD Patrick, CC BY 2.5. For millennia, the meteorite lay undiscovered beneath the surface of the farm. In 1920, the landowner encountered it by chance -- the details of the discovery are sparse in the historical record, but the object would have been hard to mistake for anything local. Hoba is a tabular...

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Image: GIRAUD Patrick | CC BY 2.5

Hoba Meteorite: Souvenirs and Salvation

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joachim Huber, CC BY-SA 2.0. The meteorite's very existence on Hoba West made it a target. Visitors wanted pieces. In 1968, one man and his friends spent three to four hours sawing off a large block with a hand saw as a souvenir -- a specimen that eventually surfaced at a Bonhams auction in Los Angeles. Relo...

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Image: Joachim Huber | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hoba Meteorite: The Largest Iron on Earth

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Compl33t, CC BY 3.0. What makes Hoba extraordinary is not just its size but what it represents. It is the most massive naturally occurring piece of ferronickel known on Earth's surface -- not merely a meteorite superlative but a geological one. Mineral collectors and planetary scientists have studied...

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Image: Compl33t | CC BY 3.0