Macrometeorites

Meteorites are meteoroids originating in outer space which survive impact with the Earth. From a total of more than 45700 recorded meteorite landings, only around 3800 have a mass larger than 1kg. This visualization is about these meteorites, which have been called "Macrometeorites".

Meteorites which have been observed while they transited the atmosphere or impacting the earth are called "falls" while all the other are called "finds". On the map it's easy to see that the most falls and finds happen in populated areas, so there are probably many other landings which have not been recorded.

Meteorites can be divided into three big groups: stony meteorites which are rocks, iron meteorites and stony-iron meteorites which contain both metallic and rocky material. Very special cases are a few meteorites which happen to come from the Moon and Mars.

Data and sources

Data: The Meteoritical Society, the data used for this visualization can be found at http://visualizing.org/datasets/meteorite-landings

General description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite

Description of the largest meteorites: Wikipedia

Created by

Roxana Torre
www.torre.nl
contact: roxana(at)torre.nl