El Meson: the 20-ton Argentine meteorite mass behind the 'sky iron' legend

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Key facts

• In July 1576 Spanish soldiers riding beyond the Rio Salado in northern Argentina were ordered by the governor to find where the metal 'is bred and lies' and haul it home; they reported 'an enormous piece of clean iron, alone on a dead flat plane, 20 tons by later estimates', with no mountain or mine within 100 miles.
• This is described as the earliest European record of a meteorite in the Americas.
• Later accounts give the place an indigenous name usually translated as 'field of the sky'; the Jesuit Jose de Aguirre recorded a local story that 'the sun fell and rivers of fire ran', possibly a memory of the impact.
• The video states that about 4,000 years earlier an asteroid broke apart over the Gran Chaco, raining iron down a corridor roughly 100 m wide.
• In 1783 naval lieutenant Miguel de Rubin was sent by the king to find the silver the tribes were said to carry; he found an immense table of iron instead, dug beneath it, levered and blasted the ground below, and found only earth. The mass was left lying in the pit and was never seen again.
• In 1799 a chip chiselled from the mass yielded the first nickel ever identified in a meteorite; the 'silver' was in fact nickel.
• Provincial maps kept using the mass as a boundary marker between two provinces for about two centuries; in 1873 Santiago del Estero passed a law offering a cash prize plus 200 km of land to whoever located it, repealed in 1937 after a claim by Juan B. Rivarola, who had insisted he invented a rainmaking machine.
• In 1961 geologist William Cassidy began magnetometer surveys of the area; in 1969 his team excavated the El Chaco mass of 28 tons but never relocated El Meson.
• The video notes that no blade of 'sky iron' has ever been identified; Argentine historian Edgardo Manniti proposed that local smiths carved the mass up into knives, spurs and mate straws.
• A curled iron shaving of 19 g in Vienna's Natural History Museum, bought from a Madrid mineral dealer in 1807 and labelled 'Tucuman', has a shape consistent with iron torn violently from a larger mass.

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