Cape York

For centuries the Inuit of north-west Greenland made blades from a meteorite – until an explorer shipped it to New York.

Key facts

Type

Iron, IIIAB (medium octahedrite)

Fell or found

Found (known to Inughuit people for centuries)

Year

1818 (first reported by Europeans)

Country

Greenland

Mass

about 58 tonnes in total, in several masses

Official name

Cape York

In 1818 a British naval expedition led by John Ross, searching for a route through the Arctic, met a group of Inughuit, the northernmost Inuit people of Greenland. The visitors were astonished to see that some of them carried knives and harpoon tips with edges of iron. In a land with no trees for fuel and no iron mines, where could the metal possibly have come from? The answer lay near Cape York, on the shores of Melville Bay: a group of enormous iron meteorites.

Iron for the Arctic

For centuries the Inughuit had treated the irons as a precious resource. Using hard hammerstones of basalt, some carried in from far away, they patiently pounded off small flakes of metal. These flakes, hammered cold into shape, were set into bone or ivory handles to make cutting edges, a laborious but life-changing technology in an environment where every tool mattered. Archaeologists have since found Cape York iron at sites far across the Arctic, showing that it was traded over long distances.

The three best-known masses had names. The largest was called the Tent, the others the Woman and the Dog, and local stories explained their shapes.

Peary and the museum

For decades Europeans failed to locate the source. In 1894 the American explorer Robert Peary was guided to the irons by Inughuit. He removed the Woman and the Dog in 1895, and in 1897, after a failed first attempt, he managed to load the giant Tent, which he called Ahnighito, onto his ship. All three were sold to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where they are still displayed. Ahnighito weighs about 31 tonnes, and its museum supports pass through the floor to rest on the bedrock beneath the building.

This story has a painful side. On the 1897 voyage Peary also brought six Inughuit people to New York. Four of them died within months from disease, including a man named Qisuk, whose young son Minik was left alone in a foreign city. Today the episode is remembered as a stark example of how explorers and institutions once treated Indigenous people and their heritage.

More giants in the ice

The Cape York irons are fragments of a single meteoroid that broke apart as it plunged through the atmosphere, scattering masses across a wide area. Further pieces were found during the 20th century. The largest, called Agpalilik, weighing about 20 tonnes, was located in 1963 by the Danish meteorite scientist Vagn Buchwald and is now in Copenhagen. Altogether, the known Cape York masses total about 58 tonnes, making it one of the largest meteorite finds on Earth.

What the iron reveals

Cape York belongs to IIIAB, the most common group of iron meteorites. These are thought to come from the core of a single parent asteroid that melted, allowing its metal to sink to the centre, before collisions eventually broke it apart. Polished and etched slices reveal a medium-sized Widmanstätten pattern, the interlocking metal crystals that grow only when metal cools very slowly, at a rate of only tens to hundreds of degrees per million years. Cape York also contains nodules of iron sulphide and other minerals that help scientists trace how the core crystallised.

Why Cape York matters

Few meteorites tie science and human history together so closely. Cape York shows how a fall from space became part of a people's way of life, how that resource was taken, and how much one strewn field can teach about the cores of shattered asteroids. Museums that hold the irons now place far more emphasis on the Inughuit story than they once did, and that wider telling is part of why Cape York remains such an important meteorite.

Did you know?

See more

Cape York in the catalogue