The
Williamette Meteorite is the largest meteorite ever found in North
America.The
meteorite was found in Oregon, but there was no impact crater at the
site – it was probably moved there by
glacial action during the Ice Age. It is made of iron nickel, and
weighs 15.5 tonnes.Mostly history forgot to include that it’s also apart of the local natives religious traditions.
thank you, @lamentedgores-adventures. the meteorite known as Tomanowos. “visitor from the sky.” taken from the Clackamas people.
after a 1905 Oregon State Supreme Court case during which an entreprenuerial American settler and the land-owning Oregon Iron and Steel Company fought over rock ownership, without any consideration for the Clackamas people, the company was legally “awarded” the meteorite. they almost immediately sold it, and by 1906 it ended up donated to the museum in NYC.
(also fun to think about is that it wasn’t just any old glacial action that may have moved the meteorite into the area; one of the most widely-accepted and popular theories is that the meteorite impacted somewhere in the southern Canadian Rockies, interior BC, or mountainous Inland Northwest generally. and the meteorite would have been sitting, perhaps, in Glacial Lake Missoula or Spokane, and then may have been washed into Willamette Valley during the famous catastrophic Missoula Floods. glacial ice created dams in narrow valley corridors in northwestern Montana, creating enormous lakes; ice dams broke and a ridiculous amount of floodwaters, all at once, cascaded through channels across the semi-arid steppe of the Inland Northwest, and reshaped the Scablands and lower Columbia basin. such catastrophic single-moment floods probably happened several times during Pleistocene, including an event only 12,500-ish years ago.)