Meteorites from viral June fireball event recovered from island in Lake Huron

Meteorites from a large fireball that was widely documented over northern Ontario skies last month have been recovered on an island in Lake Huron. 

Vancouver Island resident Dave Kenny and his American colleague Anton Clemens — members of the volunteer organization Meteorite Recovery Specialists — discovered several fragments from the meteor on Cockburn Island on July 11.

It is a mostly uninhabited island and is located off the western end of Manitoulin Island in the North Channel of Lake Huron.

Samples from the team’s discovery were submitted to the Meteor Physics Group out of Western University in London, Ont., which confirmed the rocks were from the June 19 event when a meteor weighing several hundred kilograms broke apart in the atmosphere and fell to Earth shortly after 8 p.m.

Kenny has hunted for meteorites all across the world, including in the U.S., Chile and Morocco.

This find was extra special for him as the trip to Cockburn Island marked his first meteorite recovery on Canadian soil.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Kenny said. 

But locating the pieces was no easy feat, according to the meteorite hunter. 

Since much of the island is private or protected land, Kenny told CBC that he communicated extensively with Cockburn Island council and the Nature Conservancy of Canada to determine where he and Clemens would be permitted to search.

But he explained just getting to the island was a tall order since it’s only accessible by boat. 

“We drove to the west part of Manitoulin and camped at Meldrum Bay,” he said. “I have a friend who had a sailboat and could accommodate two passengers.”

“He took us from Meldrum Bay to the east side of Cockburn Island. We hunted throughout the day on the roads and accessible public areas, then ferried back to sleep on the boat in the evenings.”

Kenny and Clemens spent two and a half days on the island, searching for 12 hours each day and logging nearly 50 kilometres of walking. 

But it only took two hours within docking at the island to locate a fragment — one that ended up being their biggest find at 57.6 grams in weight. 

“It was a fully intact stone,” he said. “That was found on the side of the road.”

Two days later, the colleagues found another stone that was broken in several pieces roughly two kilometres south of Tolsmaville — a summer hub located on the northeast end of Cockburn.

“All the stones we found were on the township roads and public access areas,” Kenny said. 

“Quite a few stones we found were feet from ATV tracks, so it was fortuitous that we were able to get there early enough to recover these before the meteorites were damaged by tires.”

The larger piece that was sent to Western University will be studied over the next six months, according to Kenny.

While they’re not officially classified yet, the rocks are suspected to be chondrites — a common type of meteorite found on Earth — and hail from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.