Discovery of 3,000-years-old meteorite pieces may reshape scientific theories

The largest known fragments of a meteorite that struck Earth more than 3,000 years ago have been discovered on the Estonian island of Saaremaa.

The find could reshape scientific understanding of the ancient impact near the village of Kaali, believed to have occurred between roughly 1600 and 800 BC, as Polish media reports.

Polish researchers Andrzej Owczarek and Filip Nikodem uncovered a 40kg fragment of the meteorite, along with another weighing 15kg and several smaller pieces.

The Kaali impact is thought to have taken place during the Bronze Age, when a meteoroid estimated at around 1,000 tonnes entered Earth’s atmosphere and broke apart.

The resulting explosion carved out a crater about 110 metres wide and 22 metres deep, along with several smaller craters nearby. The blast is believed to have flattened and burned forests across a wide area.

For the people living on Saaremaa at the time, it would have been a dramatic and terrifying घटना—later echoed in local folklore describing a “fiery stone” falling from the sky. The main crater eventually filled with water, forming what is now Lake Kaali, a site long regarded as sacred

Despite the scale of the event, only tiny meteorite fragments had been recovered for decades. Since the first discoveries in 1937, most pieces weighed just a few grams, with none exceeding 40 grams for nearly a century.

A larger fragment weighing 5.7kg, found in 2024, began to challenge those assumptions. But researchers say the newly discovered pieces offer far stronger evidence that substantial portions of the meteorite survived the impact.

In a Facebook post, the Polish Meteorite Society said the finds could make “an important contribution” to verifying existing theories about the meteorite shower, adding: “Congratulations to the seekers!”

By Nazrin Sadigova