Meteorites might be more likely to strike near the equator
A study reveals the amount of debris likely to hit Earth every year and where
![meteorite in Antarctica](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/052220_sh_meteorites_feat.jpg?fit=1028%2C579&ssl=1)
After spotting this meteorite in Antarctica from afar, Geoffrey Evatt examines it up close.
Dr. G. Evatt/ Univ. of Manchester
By Shannon Hall
Geoffrey Evatt was snowmobiling in Antarctica when he spotted an outlandish feature. A black rock stood so starkly against the diamantine ice that even the untrained eye would have known it was not from this world, but a meteorite. “You’ll never get over that high of finding the first one,” he says.
Not that it was unexpected. Before heading to Antarctica, Evatt, an applied mathematician at the University of Manchester in England, and his colleagues calculated where they might find the alien rocks. Two summers spent snaking up and down their chosen spot netted 120 in total — matching their prediction and giving them the confidence to use their calculations (plus additional ones of fireball trajectories) to create a global tally. The results, reported online April 29 in Geology, reveal that more than 17,000 impacts occur across the globe every year, with the majority of meteorites hitting low latitudes.
“The punchline is that if you want to go and see these fireballs streaking across the sky, it’s best to be near the equator,” Evatt says.
When it comes to counting meteorites, though, Antarctica is an easy target. Most meteorites collected so far have been found on the continent — thanks to the fact that a single dark rock can be spotted easily enough against a white background. Knowing how many impacts occurred within a specific region lets researchers extrapolate that number to the rest of the planet, much like how collecting rainwater in a bucket allows weather forecasters to determine how much rain fell over a larger area.