On a Sunday morning in late August 2024 a nine-year-old girl named Eli-zé du Toit was sitting on her grandparents’ porch near a small town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, when she heard a long rumble, then heard a rustling in a nearby fig tree. As she watched, a rock fell out of the tree. When Eli-zé picked it up, she noticed that the rock had a black crust and a grey interior “like concrete”. It was warm on the crust and cold on the inside. Elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, videos and photographs on social media of a bright light in the sky tipped scientists off to the possibility that a meteorite had fallen in the area. A meteorite is a piece of rocky space debris that survives after colliding with the Earth. On 26 August, a day after the event, scientists confirmed that there was sufficient evidence to link the two events to a “likely car-sized” rock fragment having entered Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated over the Eastern Cape.
The rock young Eli-zé found was just one small fragment of that meteorite, weighing in at about 90 grams. It was unveiled at a press conference involving scientists from Nelson Mandela University, Rhodes University as well as the University of the Witwatersrand, on 3 September. The Conversation Africa asked two of them, Roger Gibson and Deon van Niekerk, to explain the importance of the find.
