Iron, fine octahedriteGibeon, Great Nama Land, Namibia

Like most iron meteorites, Gibeon meteorites originated 4.5 billion years ago from the molten core of an asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter whose shattered remains are part of the asteroid belt. An impact event ejected what was to become the Gibeon mass into interplanetary space, and Gibeon meteorites are the bounty that occurred thousands of years ago when the wandering iron mass slammed into Earth’s atmosphere before exploding and raining down in what is now the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. In previous generations, indigenous tribesmen recovered the smallest meteorite shards and fashioned them into spear points and other tools. This specimen was recovered with the aid of a metal detector. Its final shape being the product of a fortuitous combination of variables including its composition, the soil chemistry in which it landed, its orientation in the ground and the amount of groundwater to which it was exposed — all of which slowly reshaped this mass as it sat near the Earth’s surface as the seasons turned over thousands of years. In effect, this meteorite was hewn by monumental forces encountered in space, frictional heating as it plunged through Earth’s atmosphere as well as the effects of Earth’s elements. While the vast majority of iron meteorites are prosaically shaped, that is not the case in regard to this engaging 4.5-billion-year-old otherworldly form, a tabletop sculpture from outer space.