Jacobus Hermanus Brits
The farmer whose plough struck the Hoba iron in 1920, the largest single meteorite known.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Namibian (South West African)
- Field
- Farmer
Jacobus Hermanus Brits farmed land called Hoba West, near the town of Grootfontein in what was then South West Africa and is now Namibia. One day in 1920 he was ploughing a field behind an ox when the plough jolted to a halt with a loud scraping of metal.
Digging down, he uncovered a flat block of dark metal. As it was cleared, it turned out to be enormous: about 2.7 metres long, 2.7 metres wide and nearly a metre thick, with an estimated mass of about 60 tonnes. It was an iron meteorite, made mainly of iron with about 16 per cent nickel, a type known as an ataxite.
Hoba has never been moved, because it is simply too heavy. Scientists think it landed less than about 80,000 years ago. Its flat shape may have helped it skip and slow down in the atmosphere, so that it hit the ground at a relatively low speed and left no crater.
Over the following decades, visitors chipped and sawed pieces off it, and its mass has fallen. In 1955 the government declared it a national monument, and in 1987 the then owner of the farm gave the meteorite and the land around it to the state. Today visitors can walk down stone steps around it in an amphitheatre built for the purpose.
On the timeline
- 1920A plough strikes Hoba
- 15 March 1955Hoba becomes a national monument