Visualisation

Every recorded meteorite landing on Earth

32,187 space rocks with known coordinates, plotted as a single dot per strike. The continents draw themselves — but the densest clusters aren't where you'd expect.

Every recorded meteorite landing with known coordinates
Each red dot is a recorded meteorite landing. Dot size scales with logged mass. The big patch in East Antarctica isn't a strike zone — it's a search zone (more on that below).

NASA's Meteorite Landings dataset is a list of every meteorite humans have officially recorded — 32,187 of them with known coordinates, mass, mineralogical class, and date of fall or discovery. Plot every one on a world map and you get a strange portrait: the continents emerge from the dots, but the density is wildly uneven.

Why Antarctica looks like a strike zone

It isn't. Antarctica receives roughly the same meteorite flux per square kilometre as anywhere else on Earth — but two things make it the world's best meteorite-hunting ground. First, dark rocks lying on white ice are easy to spot from a distance. Second, the slow flow of the ice sheet concentrates meteorites into "stranding zones" — patches of blue ice near mountains where embedded rocks rise to the surface. The Allan Hills Main Ice Field alone has yielded thousands of specimens. So that cluster is really a record of human searching, not space's bias.

"Fell" vs "Found"

Each record is tagged either Fell (someone saw it land) or Found (it was discovered later, no observed arrival). The split is dramatic: 1,107 witnessed falls versus 44,609 found specimens. Witnessed falls are scientifically more useful — you know exactly when the rock arrived — but they're a tiny fraction of what's out there.

Meteorites recorded per decade 0 4439 8878 13317 17757 1800s 1810s 1820s 1830s 1840s 1850s 1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s
Recorded strikes per decade. The recent spike is almost entirely the Antarctic search programs and an increase in Saharan desert prospecting.

The biggest pieces

Most meteorites are small — gram-scale pebbles. A handful are tons. Here are the ten heaviest individual specimens on record:

NameMassYearCoordinates
Hoba60,000,000 g1920-19.6°, 17.9°
Cape York58,200,000 g181876.1°, -64.9°
Campo del Cielo50,000,000 g1575-27.5°, -60.6°
Canyon Diablo30,000,000 g189135.0°, -111.0°
Armanty28,000,000 g189847.0°, 88.0°
Gibeon26,000,000 g1836-25.5°, 18.0°
Chupaderos24,300,000 g185227.0°, -105.1°
Mundrabilla24,000,000 g1911-30.8°, 127.5°
Sikhote-Alin23,000,000 g194746.2°, 134.7°
Bacubirito22,000,000 g186326.2°, -107.8°

The undisputed champion, Hoba, is a single 60-ton iron-nickel meteorite that landed in what's now Namibia roughly 80,000 years ago. It was discovered in 1920 by a farmer plowing his field — he heard a metallic scrape and dug down to find a refrigerator-sized block of nickel-iron. It's never been moved, and at 60 tons it's the largest single piece of natural iron ever found at Earth's surface.

The shape of the data

Total records~45,000 with coordinates
Observed falls1,107
Later finds44,609
Date range~860 CE (Nogata, Japan — recorded by Shinto priests) to present
Largest knownHoba meteorite, ~60,000 kg

Try it yourself

The CSV is small enough to load in any tool. Each row has a name, mass, class, year, and coordinates:

curl -O https://data.nasa.gov/docs/legacy/meteorite_landings/Meteorite_Landings.csv

# Quick: how many fell vs were found?
awk -F, 'NR>1 {print $6}' Meteorite_Landings.csv | sort | uniq -c

Sources