Qualla: Tenham (meteorite)

Tenham (meteorite): Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chemical Engineer, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a spring night in 1879, the sky over a stretch of western Queensland filled with streaking light. People watching saw bright meteors racing roughly west to east, and somewhere out past the Tenham sheep station, near a place called South Gregory, stones began to fall. Around 300 of them came down across a strip of country some 20 kilometres long and 5 wide. Nobody wrote down the exact date. The pieces lay in the dry red dirt, scattered and ignored, until station hands started picking them up in the early 1930s. Those plain dark rocks turned out to be a doorway to the centre of the Earth.

Read more: Tenham (meteorite) on Qualla

Image: Chemical Engineer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tenham (meteorite): A Visitor From the Asteroid Belt

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chemical Engineer, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Tenham stones are chondrites, fragments of an ancient asteroid that never grew into a planet, and they carry a high load of organic compounds along with silicates, oxides, and sulfides. What makes them priceless is where they fell. The Channel Country is bone-dry and remote, ...

Read more: Tenham (meteorite) on Qualla

Image: Chemical Engineer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tenham (meteorite): Pressure Written in Stone

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit the paleobear from Lontananza, Loreto, Peru, CC BY 2.0. The asteroid that birthed the Tenham stones met a violent end. Somewhere in space it was struck by another body, and the collision drove shock waves through the rock at staggering pressures and temperatures near 2,000 degrees Celsius. Those shock waves left dark veins threading t...

Read more: Tenham (meteorite) on Qualla

Image: the paleobear from Lontananza, Loreto, Peru | CC BY 2.0

Tenham (meteorite): Naming the Unreachable

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chemical Engineer, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1969, a purple mineral was identified in the Tenham shock veins, appearing as rounded grains no wider than a hair, the high-pressure form of olivine. It was named ringwoodite after the Australian National University geologist A. E. Ringwood, who had argued such a substance mus...

Read more: Tenham (meteorite) on Qualla

Image: Chemical Engineer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tenham (meteorite): The Sky as a Drill Core

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chemical Engineer, CC BY-SA 3.0. There is a beautiful irony in Tenham. To study the deep Earth, you cannot go down; the mantle starts far below the deepest borehole ever sunk and stays out of reach. So geologists go up instead, reading the interior of our own planet in rocks that fell from the sky. A collision b...

Read more: Tenham (meteorite) on Qualla

Image: Chemical Engineer | CC BY-SA 3.0