{"id":242737,"date":"2026-08-15T01:15:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T06:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/entirely-surprising-scientists-have-found-a-martian-meteorite-unlike-any-known-before"},"modified":"2026-08-15T01:15:02","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T06:15:02","slug":"entirely-surprising-scientists-have-found-a-martian-meteorite-unlike-any-known-before","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/entirely-surprising-scientists-have-found-a-martian-meteorite-unlike-any-known-before","title":{"rendered":"\u201cEntirely Surprising\u201d \u2014 Scientists Have Found a Martian Meteorite Unlike Any Known Before"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/entirely-surprising-scientists-have-found-a-martian-meteorite-unlike-any-known-before2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>A meteorite found in Algeria has opened a rare window into nearly 2 billion years of Mars\u2019 history that had largely been missing from the geological record.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at <a href=\"https:\/\/scitechdaily.com\/tag\/boston-college\/\">Boston College<\/a> have determined that Northwest Africa (NWA) 13,441, a rock blasted from Mars before eventually reaching Earth, crystallized about 1.273 billion years ago. Its age places it squarely within a huge gap in the known record of shergottites, the most common type of Martian igneous meteorite. Even more unexpectedly, its chemistry points to a deep Martian source unlike any previously identified in this group.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe characteristics of this meteorite were entirely surprising,\u201d said Ethan Baxter, a Boston College professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and founder of the university\u2019s Center for Isotope Geochemistry. \u201cNo other Martian meteorite like this has an age of 1.27 billion years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A meteorite found in Algeria has opened a rare window into nearly 2 billion years of Mars\u2019 history that had largely been missing from the geological record. Researchers at Boston College have determined that Northwest Africa (NWA) 13,441, a rock blasted from Mars before eventually reaching Earth, crystallized about 1.273 billion years ago. Its age [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}