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Muonionalusta
Iron, IVA
Found 1906
Muonionalusta, Sweden

In 1906 two children were tending cattle near the village of Kitkiöjärvi in northermost Sweden.

While kicking at stones lying on the ground, one child suddenly struck an exceptionally heavy and rusty object, which they took home to the village.

It was later identified as an iron meteorite and was described by Högbom (1910) under the name Muonionalusta. It was studied much later by Malmqvist (1948).

In 1946, a second meteorite was found, in Kitkiöjoki, where the foundations of a house were being excavated. From these two iron meteorites and the paucity of the population, Wickman concluded that a meteorite crater must exist in the area, and visited the general area in 1956, hoping to locate the crater. Regrettably, his hopes were in vain but he did discover that there was an oral tradition in Kitkiöjärvi regarding another iron meteorites as a result of the first recovered meteorite in 1906. According to the man who told the story to hid children, he had found it in the village probably in the 1870s, though it was later discarded.

Subsequently Wickman (1956) wrote a pamphlet, which was printed and distributed to every household in the area to make known the possibility of finding meteorites. Eventually, in 1963, a third iron meteorite was discovered, this time during the building of a logging track not very far from Kitkiöjoki. All the meteorites so far found are described by Wickman (1963, 1964) and by Buchwald (1975).

Chang & Wänke (1969) established the terrestrial age (> 800.000 years) of one of the meteorites and some of its consequences are discussed by Wickman (1970). As Sweden, and especially its northern parts, has been repeatedly glaciated during the last one million years it became evident that the meteorites must have undergone a complex glacial transport history before their discovery. For this reason Wickman encouraged Lagerbäck, who has experience of the glacial geology of the region, to take an interest in the meteorites and their terrestrial history.

Inspired by the prospect of discovering an impact crater, potentially containing a Quarternary stratigraphy dating back several hundreds of thousands of years, Lagerbäck visited the area in 1989. Aerial photographs covering the area were studied and the geological conditions at the find sites, the regolith stratigraphy included, were examined. However, no obvius crater could be identified, though an interesting piece of information was obtained from people occupied with road work between Kitkiöjoki and Kitkiöjärvi. They told how the previous year a stone crusher, working in a lonely area NW of Muodoslompolo, became jammed by a piece of "soft iron". Eventually this trail revealed that two pieces of this "iron" had been encountered and fortunately one had been secured before it could pass through the crusher.

For more information and pictures from the area look at: http://www.muonionalustameteorites.com

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