The Pratt Tribune has a good article about that 1,430 lb meteorite discovered in Kansas last month by professional meteorite hound Steve Arnold. It's the third larget meteorite in history.
Arnold found the meteorite on Oct. 16 using a special eight feet wide metal detector. He had been hunting the field, which belongs to Allen Binford of Haviland, since he arrived in Haviland on Sept. 30 and had already found a couple of other meteorites in the field, including one that weighed 280 pounds, before he came upon the big one which was buried 88 inches (that's over seven feet) below the surface, Arnold said.
Arnold had been digging in the field for over two weeks and after digging down a few feet decided to call in some help. He hired area farmer Dan Woods to bring his back hoe and dig for him. He had used Woods before but that item turned out to be an old iron wagon wheel.
What's the biggest meteorite? The Ahnighito meteorite, which weighs 36-and-a-half tons. It is just a fragment of a much larger meteorite called the Cape York Meteorite, which weighed 200 tons. It landed in Greenland over 1000 years ago and was used by the Inuit people as a source of metal tips for spears and harpoons. The Inuit people kept the location of the meteorite fragments a secret, but in 1894 Robert Peary traded one of them a gun for the location of the Ahnighito fragment.
From an article about Peary and the meteorites:
Over the next three years, Peary's expeditions managed to load the pieces of the metoerite onto ships despite severe weather, engineering problems, and having to build Greenland's only railway specifically for the task. Upon arrival in New York City, the source of Greenland's Iron Age was sold to the American Museum of Natural History for $40,000. Several more large masses have since been found and recovered from the strewnfield, including, in the 1960s, the 15-ton Agpalilik, thought to be the legendary "Man" and fourth member of the Cape York family.
