Vagn Buchwald
The Danish metallurgist whose three-volume handbook described almost every iron meteorite known, and who recovered the Agpalilik iron from Greenland.
Key facts
- Born
- 1929
- Died
- 2025
- Nationality
- Danish
- Field
- Metallurgist
Vagn Fabritius Buchwald was a metallurgist at the Technical University of Denmark who brought the eye of a metals expert to iron meteorites. He studied how their patterns and minerals formed, how they were changed by shock and heating, and how they rust.
Over many years he examined polished and etched slices of hundreds of iron meteorites from collections around the world. In 1975 he published the Handbook of Iron Meteorites, three large volumes describing about 600 irons one by one, with photographs and analyses. It is still one of the most used reference works in meteoritics.
In 1963 Buchwald led an expedition to the Cape York region of north-west Greenland, where Robert Peary had taken three great iron masses in the 1890s. His team found another large piece, Agpalilik, weighing about 20 tonnes, and in 1967 it was shipped to Copenhagen, where it is displayed at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
Buchwald also wrote about the history of iron and steel making, and studied ancient iron objects made from meteorites by the Inuit of Greenland. The mineral buchwaldite, a phosphate found in iron meteorites, is named after him.