Since the year 1790, roughly 45,000 meteorite strikes were documented. The data indicates that 52 of them weighed more than 1 metric ton (1000 kg), the weight of a small car. In the map below, we color these heavy strikes in red. The data was compiled by NASA. The map was created using Python and its libraries Matplotlib and Basemap.
The map shows an island off the coast of Africa, Ascension Island, that was struck by a large meteorite. In fact the island is home to a team of atmospheric researchers with sophisticated meteor detection equipment.
Much thanks to reddit user /u/Glorymuffin for reminding me of the fact that meteors burn up in the atmosphere while Meteorites strike the earth.
First. Really cool, and thank you for sharing the source!
Second. My initial thought: these don’t look randomly distributed. I’d be interested in seeing the distribution across latitude and longitude, corrected by land area (presumably these are terrestrial strikes).
Thanks again!
I think the reason that they are not randomly distributed is that they are observed meteor strikes. The unobserved strikes are not listed.
Yes, agreed. But, if they are randomly distributed and biased by observation, then wouldn’t we expect to see a bias towards the densities of observers?
To me, now taking observation into account, it seems like there’s the strongest relationship between strikes and plant-community structure (the physiognomy). Maybe they’re easier to find with low-kying vegetation? For instance, in the heavily-forested tropical areas around the equator (also, equatorial area is much greater than in this unprojected map), there are very few strikes. In North America, they are mostly observed in the plains and deserts, and not in the eastern or Canadian forests. In South America, the Atacama desert is the hotspot. In Africa, the Sahara and some of the southern grasslands and deserts. Australia is mostly in the desert and not in the eastern forests. And Eurasia seems to fit this pattern, but I don’t know about central and deserted Eurasia (the so-called Middle East and Oman, for instance).
Again, thanks for the post.