Man Thinks Red Rock Has Gold, What It Turns Out To Be Leaves Him Speechless
How many of us get lucky when using metal detectors to uncover something buried deep underground? Not many. Murphy’s Law that states that “a valuable dropped item will always fall into an inaccessible place” and that’s true, to some extent. I know if I used a metal detector the only thing I will discover is nails, screws, and wires, and that’s because I’m not David Hole. In 2015, David Hole was busy investigating Australia’s Maryborough Regional Park with his metal detector when suddenly it started beeping – Hole found an extremely heavy, reddish rock encased in some yellow clay.
What would you think if you stumbled upon a heavy stone surrounded by yellow clay? Gold. Well, that’s what Hole thought as he took the heavy rock home, convinced that there was a gold nugget buried inside it. After all, in the 19th century, the Goldfields region, where Maryborough Regional Park is situated, saw a peak in the Australian gold rush. So naturally, he wasn’t wrong to assume that buried deep inside the rock could be his ticket to becoming a billionaire. After reaching home, the first thing he did was to try to open the rock. He used a rock saw, a grinder, a drill, a sledgehammer, and even some acid to pry open the rock, but nothing worked.
For three long years, Hole tried everything he could to break open the rock, but since nothing worked, he took it to the Melbourne Museum, hoping to find a way to claim his “gold nugget”. Head of Sciences at Museums Victoria, Dermot Henry claimed that Hole’s rock had a dimpled look to it, similar to what meteorites look like when they fall through the Earth’s atmosphere. Apparently what Hole had discovered wasn’t gold, it was, in fact, a 4.6 billion-year-old rare meteorite that weighed a whopping 37.5 pounds! In short, it was much more valuable than gold.
After using a diamond saw to slice a small portion of the rock, geologist Bill Birch and Henry claimed that the rock was an ‘H5 ordinary chondrite meteorite’, which means that it was formed the same time as Earth was formed. Dr. Birch stated that the rock would help them determine Earth’s age and provide a way for them to understand how the solar system was formed. Henry stated that while many people request them to examine thousands of rocks they think are meteorites, only two have turned out to be real meteorites – Hole’s rock was one of the two. According to Museums Victoria Collection, the first meteorite weighed nearly 20 pounds and was discovered in 1998 in Buckley’s farm near Willow Grove, Gippsland. Here’s hoping that Hole was paid well for his incredible discovery!
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