Federal Customs Service of Russia / TASS
Rare meteorite worth millions was almost lost on the black market
Russian customs authorities caught smugglers trying to send a fragment of the legendary Aleta meteorite, worth €3.6 million, disguised as a garden ornament, to the UK.
One rare meteoritevalued at millions of euros, was about to be lost on the black market after being declared as simple outdoor decoration.
Initially, customs agents at a large seaport would be expected to find contraband weapons, narcotics, stolen antiquities, tobacco, or counterfeit medicines.
What no one would probably expect was for them to open a wooden box and find a fragment from the beginning of the Solar System weighing 2.5 tons and several thousand millions of years.
But that is precisely what happened in the port of St. Petersburg last month. Russian authorities embarked on an audacious attempt to smuggle a huge, rough, massive gray space rock.
The smugglers had the destination the United Kingdom. To pass the inspectors, bluntly labeled the extraterrestrial artifact as a simple garden sculpture.
“The cargo of strategic importance was discovered during the inspection of a sea container in the port of Saint Petersburg,” the Russian Federal Customs Service said in a statement cited by .
“When trying to export it, it was declared as garden sculpture. But a detailed inspection revealed that the origin and value of the cargo differed from the declared information”, adds the note.
Russian customs stopped a 2.5-ton meteorite fragment from being shipped to the UK after it was declared as a “landscape sculpture.”
Experts say it’s part of the Aletai iron meteorite, valued at about $4.2 million. A smuggling case over “strategically important resources” has…
— Brian McDonald (@BrianMcDonaldIE)
Forensic experts quickly identified the true nature of the charge. The rock is a huge fragment of the legendary Aletai meteorite. The piece will have an estimated black market value of 323 million rubles, or about $4.2 million.
But after all, what is the Aletai meteorite and why would anyone go to so much trouble to send it across the English Channel?
This space rock has more than 4.5 billion yearsdating back to the formation of the Solar System. No one knows the exact date this gigantic block of iron hit the Earth, placing the impact somewhere in Prehistory. But it is known exactly how it fell.
Most meteors plunge directly into the atmosphere, ending up disintegrating or opening a single crater.
But Aletai did something completely different: entered the atmosphere with a very small angle and, in practice, it bounced off the earth’s surface like a flat stone thrown into a lake.
This rare trajectory, similar to a stone skipping across water, spread debris over a huge area. Scientists estimate that Aletai’s debris scattering field extends at least 430 kilometers. It holds the record for the largest scattering field of meteorite fragments ever identified on our planet.
The first large fragment of Aletai meteorite debris was found in 1898, in the Xinjiang region of northwest China. For more than a century, scientists thought this massive 28-ton block, initially named Armanty, was all that existed.
Starting in the early 2000s, anonymous geologists and researchers began to find more massive iron rocks in the region. They had names like Ulasitai, Akebulake and WuQilike.
However, as scientists analyzed the chemical composition of these gigantic rocks, they realized that shared an identical signature and highly unusual. They were all fragments from the same prehistoric impact.
In 2016, scientists officially grouped them under the name Aletai. Altogether, the recovered fragments weigh impressive 74 tonswhich makes Aletai one of the largest iron meteorites ever found. Several of its individual fragments are, in fact, among the ten largest meteorites on Earth.
But how it ended up in a shipping box in Russia a 2.5-ton fragment of a recently identified Chinese meteorite?
Customs officials remain silent regarding the identity of the smugglers. They confirmed, however, that the rock entered Russia from a unidentified member of the Eurasian Economic Unionled by Moscow. This trading bloc includes countries such as Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
This loophole is likely to have provided smugglers with a relatively un-scrutinized route to get the heavy illegal goods to St Petersburg before planning their sea journey to the UK.
O astronomical price of more than 3.5 million euros easily explains the financial motivation behind the operation. But it also highlights a growing crisis in the scientific community.
Meteorites are highly coveted by private collectors. There is a vibrant, and sometimes illicit, global market for these rocks from space.
When private buyers lock up meteorites in personal collections or cut them up to sell as curiosity jewelry, science loses. Researchers depend on these ancient fragments to decipher the composition of the early Solar System.
Meteorites like Aletai are exceptionally rare. Scientists classify it in a rare and unusual chemical group of meteorites known as IIIE-an. In simple terms, it contains anomalous and unexpected levels of gold, cobalt and iridiumwhich challenge conventional scientific models.
The composition of the Aletai iron meteorites is so unique that, according to researchers, there is absolutely no other sample comparable in meteorite collections around the world.
