32,186 located meteorites from NASA's catalog: where they were found, how heavy they were, and why most of them are in Antarctica.
NASA's Meteorite Landings catalog lists 45,716 meteorites; 32,186 of them carry a location. Drawn as a heatmap, the map is not a map of where meteorites fall (they fall evenly across the globe) but of where people look: the ice of Antarctica, the deserts of North Africa and Oman, the plains of the American Midwest.
A fall is a meteorite someone saw arrive: a fireball, a sonic boom, a hole in a roof. A find is a stone recognised later, sometimes centuries later. Only 1,096 of the located meteorites are witnessed falls; everything else was found. On this beat the amber circles are falls, magenta are finds, and circle size scales with mass.
The callout marks Chelyabinsk: on 15 February 2013 a 20-metre asteroid exploded over the Urals and the recovered stones entered the catalog within weeks.
The giants are almost all irons, the dense nickel-iron cores of shattered asteroids that survive the atmosphere. Follow the numbered stops: Hoba in Namibia (60 t), Cape York in Greenland (58 t), Campo del Cielo in Argentina (50 t), Canyon Diablo in Arizona (30 t), Armanty in China (28 t) and Willamette in Oregon (15.5 t). Anything above 15 t is pulsing.
Hoba is the largest known meteorite and the largest single piece of iron found on the surface of the Earth. It fell perhaps 80,000 years ago, made no crater (it is thought to have skipped through the atmosphere like a flat stone) and was found in 1920 by a farmer ploughing his field. It has never been moved.
It is a national monument now, and the plough is the only thing that has ever hit it.
Filter the catalog to finds since 1970 and two things happen: Antarctica fills up, and a second harvest appears in the hot deserts: the Sahara from Morocco to Libya, and Oman. Dark stones on pale sand are easy to spot, and systematic searches through the 1990s and 2000s added thousands of finds per decade.
22,099 of the located meteorites, 69 % of them, were collected in Antarctica. Ice flowing against the Transantarctic Mountains concentrates stones that fell over tens of thousands of years onto bare blue-ice fields, where they are the only rocks in sight. Field teams pick them up by the hundred.
The catalog records most of them at the coordinates of their field site, so thousands of stones collapse into a few dozen dots: Yamato, Allan Hills, the Queen Alexandra Range, Grosvenor Mountains. The heatmap is back on this beat because it is the only honest way to show how heavy those dots are.