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Campo Del Cielo
Iron, IAB
Found 1576
Chaco Province, Argentina

The Campo del Cielo iron meteorites were found situated on the border between the provinces of Chaco and Santiago del Estero, Argentina . The crater field covers an area of 3×20 kilometers and contains at least 26 craters. The craters' age is estimated as 4,000–5,000 years. The meteorites were reported in 1576, but were already well known to inhabitants of the area.

In 1576, the governor of a province in Northern Argentina commissioned the military to search for a huge mass of iron, which he had heard that Indians used for their weapons. The Indians claimed that the mass had fallen from the sky in a place they called Piguem Nonralta which the Spanish translated as Campo del Cielo ("Field of the Sky"). The expedition found a large mass of metal protruding out of the soil. They assumed it was an iron mine and brought back a few samples, which were described as being of unusual purity. The governor documented the expedition and deposited the report in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville , but it was quickly forgotten and later reports on that area merely repeated the Indian legends. Following the legends, in 1774 don Bartolome Francisco de Maguna rediscovered the iron mass which he called el Meson de Fierro ("the Table of Iron"). Maguna thought the mass was the tip of an iron vein. The next expedition, led by Rubin de Celis in 1783, used explosives to clear the ground around the mass and found that it was probably a single stone. Celis estimated its mass as 15 tons and abandoned it as worthless. He himself did not believe that the stone had fallen from the sky and assumed that it had formed by a volcanic eruption. However, he sent the samples to the Royal Society of London and published his report in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Those samples were later analyzed and found to contain 90% iron and 10% nickel and assigned to a meteoritic origin.

Later, many iron pieces were found in the area weighing from a few milligrams to 34 tons. The total mass of the Campo del Cielo fragments found so far exceeds 60 tons, making it the heaviest meteorite ever recovered on Earth.

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