#UBAR SAUDI ARABIA SERIES#
Most were found in Ash Sharqiyah, or the Eastern Province, with 82 meteorites discovered during a series of expeditions from 2008 to 2014.įor more information, visit KAUST online.The legendary Empty Quarter (Rub al Khali) is one of the world’s largest and most famous deserts, stretching northwards from Oman into Saudi Arabia, Yemen and up into the western UAE. In all, 111 meteorites have been discovered in Saudi Arabia, some weighing less than a gram.
Once thought have occurred 6,400 years ago, some geologists now believe the Wabar meteorite landed in the latter part of 19th century, when there were eyewitness reports of a fireball passing above Riyadh, although other academics cite the sighting of another flaming meteor over Yemen in 1704 as the likely source: Bedouin myth of an ancient city damned by God seems to have become intertwined with a relatively recent astronomical event. “A shock wave travelled backward through the body, causing part of it to spall off with little damage the rest of the meteorite melted and amalgamated with sand directly underneath surrounding sand was compressed into impactite,” Wynn wrote in a paper for Scientific American that describes Wabar as spanning an area of 500 meters by 1,000 meters. He estimates that its mass was at least 3,180 metric tons, which is the weight of about 20 houses. Wynn, who recorded shade temperatures of 61 Celsius while at the site in May 1994, describes how the meteorite arrived at an angle of 22-45 degrees, compressing and flattening near-instantly as it struck the sand. Wynn led the first of his three expeditions to Wabar. Located at a latitude of N21° 30’, a longitude of E50° 28’ and with a diameter of 110 meters, the main crater’s depth has varied according to the fluctuating sands-from 12.5 meters in 1932, to 8 meters in 1966, and 2 meters in 1994 when American geophysicist Jeffrey C. He also found a smaller, 210-kilogram meteorite, with both rocks transported to Dhahran before being transferred to Riyadh’s King Saud University in 1968. The largest meteorite was more than a meter in diameter and weighed 2,045 kilograms, “its head-formed into a cone shape when the meteorite penetrated the atmosphere like a bullet-was imbedded in sand, which had drifted over the top,” Mandaville wrote in an account of his trip republished in Aramco’s in-house magazine in 1986. In the mid-1960s, Aramco received reports from Bedouin tribesmen that the sands around the craters had shifted, revealing a camel-hump-sized iron rock, which probably broke off from the main meteorite before impact.Īramco official James Mandaville led an expedition, locating two meteorites and identifying three craters in total. Philby called the site Wabar, a transliteration of Ubar. He despatched the specimens to the British Museum, whose experts determined that these were in fact astral rocks, the craters formed by a meteorite strike not a volcano. “It was immensely heavy, as the camels had good reason to know for the next month or more, and its dimensions were 27 x 9 x 9 centimeters,” wrote Philby.
They found a meteorite Philby describes as the size of a rabbit. Philby’s companions mistakenly thought the meteorite fragments were relics from a once-great desert city. “These craters were respectively about 100 and 50 yards in diameter, sunken in the middle but half choked with sand, while inside and outside their walls lay what I took to be lava in great circles where it seemed to have flowed from a fiery furnace.” “I found myself looking down on the ruins of what appeared to be a volcano! … And below me, as I stood on that hill-top transfixed, lay the twin craters, whose black walls stood up gauntly above the encroaching sand like the battlements and bastions of some great castle,” Philby wrote in the January 1933 edition of The Geographical Journal. “It was immensely heavy, as the camels had good reason to know.”īeginning with 19 men and 32 camels, the 1,800-mile trek took three months to complete, the Bedouin guides locating the “city” with relative ease, although a fabled iron slab the size of a camel’s head could not be found.
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