A "meteorite fall", also called an "observed fall", is a meteorite collected after its arrival was observed by people or automated devices. Any other meteorite is called a "meteorite find". There are more than 1,100 documented falls listed in widely used databases, most of which have specimens in modern collections. , the
Meteoritical Bulletin Database had 1,180 confirmed falls. In this case, two cameras used to photograph meteors captured images of the fireball. The images were used both to determine the location of the stones on the ground and, more significantly, to calculate for the first time an accurate orbit for a recovered meteorite. Following the Příbram fall, other nations established automated observing programs aimed at studying infalling meteorites. One of these was the
Prairie Network, operated by the
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory from 1963 to 1975 in the
midwestern US. This program also observed a meteorite fall, the
Lost City chondrite, allowing its recovery and a calculation of its orbit. Another program in Canada, the Meteorite Observation and Recovery Project, ran from 1971 to 1985. It too recovered a single meteorite,
Innisfree, in 1977. Finally, observations by the
European Fireball Network, a descendant of the original Czech program that recovered Příbram, led to the discovery and orbit calculations for the
Neuschwanstein meteorite in 2002. NASA has an automated system that detects meteors and calculates the orbit, magnitude,
ground track, and other parameters over the southeast USA, which often detects a number of events each night.
Finds Until the twentieth century, only a few hundred meteorite finds had ever been discovered. More than 80% of these were iron and stony-iron meteorites, which are easily distinguished from local rocks. To this day, few stony meteorites are reported each year that can be considered to be "accidental" finds. The reason there are now more than 30,000 meteorite finds in the world's collections started with the discovery by
Harvey H. Nininger that meteorites are much more common on the surface of the Earth than was previously thought.
Canada Meteorites that land in Canada are protected under the
Cultural Property Export and Import Act. In July 2024, a meteorite was recorded by security footage crashing into a residential property in
Marshfield, Prince Edward Island. It is believed to be the first time such an event has been captured on camera and the sound of the crash recorded. It was subsequently registered as the Charlottetown meteorite, named after the city near to where it landed.
United States Nininger's strategy was to search for meteorites in the
Great Plains of the United States, where the land was largely cultivated and the soil contained few rocks. Between the late 1920s and the 1950s, he traveled across the region, educating local people about what meteorites looked like and what to do if they thought they had found one, for example, in the course of clearing a field. The result was the discovery of more than 200 new meteorites, mostly stony types. In the late 1960s,
Roosevelt County, New Mexico was found to be a particularly good place to find meteorites. After the discovery of a few meteorites in 1967, a public awareness campaign resulted in the finding of nearly 100 new specimens in the next few years, with many being by a single person, Ivan Wilson. In total, nearly 140 meteorites were found in the region since 1967. In the area of the finds, the ground was originally covered by a shallow, loose soil sitting atop a
hardpan layer. During the
dustbowl era, the loose soil was blown off, leaving any rocks and meteorites that were present stranded on the exposed surface. , California, in 2006 Beginning in the mid-1960s, amateur meteorite hunters began scouring the arid areas of the southwestern United States. To date, thousands of meteorites have been recovered from the
Mojave,
Sonoran,
Great Basin, and
Chihuahuan Deserts, with many being recovered on
dry lake beds. Significant finds include the three-tonne
Old Woman meteorite, currently on display at the
Desert Discovery Center in
Barstow, California, and the Franconia and Gold Basin meteorite strewn fields; hundreds of kilograms of meteorites have been recovered from each. A number of finds from the American Southwest have been submitted with false find locations, as many finders think it is unwise to publicly share that information for fear of confiscation by the federal government and competition with other hunters at published find sites. Several of the meteorites found recently are currently on display in the
Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and at
UCLA's Meteorite Gallery.
Antarctica revealed structures resembling bacteria fossils – in the meteorite
ALH84001 discovered in Antarctica in 1984. Microscopically, the features were initially interpreted as fossils of bacteria-like lifeforms. It has since been shown that similar
magnetite structures can form without the presence of microbial life in hydrothermal systems. A few meteorites were found in
Antarctica between 1912 and 1964. In 1969, the 10th Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition found nine meteorites on a
blue ice field near the
Yamato Mountains. With this discovery, came the realization that movement of
ice sheets might act to concentrate meteorites in certain areas. After a dozen other specimens were found in the same place in 1973, a Japanese expedition was launched in 1974 dedicated to the search for meteorites. This team recovered nearly 700 meteorites. Shortly thereafter, the United States began its own program to search for Antarctic meteorites, operating along the
Transantarctic Mountains on the other side of the continent: the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (
ANSMET) program. European teams, starting with a consortium called "EUROMET" in the 1990/91 season, and continuing with a program by the Italian Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide have also conducted systematic searches for Antarctic meteorites. The Antarctic Scientific Exploration of China has conducted successful meteorite searches since 2000. A Korean program (KOREAMET) was launched in 2007 and has collected a few meteorites. The combined efforts of all of these expeditions have produced more than 23,000 classified meteorite specimens since 1974, with thousands more that have not yet been classified. For more information see the article by Harvey (2003).
Australia At about the same time as meteorite concentrations were being discovered in the cold desert of Antarctica, collectors discovered that many meteorites could also be found in the hot
deserts of Australia. Several dozen meteorites had already been found in the
Nullarbor Plain region of
Western Australia and
South Australia. Systematic searches between about 1971 and the present recovered more than 500 others, ~300 of which are currently well characterized. The meteorites can be found in this region because the land presents a flat, featureless, plain covered by
limestone. In the extremely arid climate, there has been relatively little
weathering or
sedimentation on the surface for tens of thousands of years, allowing meteorites to accumulate without being buried or destroyed. The dark-colored meteorites can then be recognized among the very different looking limestone pebbles and rocks.
The Sahara , Algeria. Currently classified as an L3.8-6
ordinary chondrite it shows
brecciation and abundant
chondrules. In 1986–87, a German team installing a network of seismic stations while prospecting for oil discovered about 65 meteorites on a flat, desert plain about southeast of Dirj (Daraj),
Libya. A few years later, a desert enthusiast saw photographs of meteorites being recovered by scientists in Antarctica, and thought that he had seen similar occurrences in
northern Africa. In 1989, he recovered about 100 meteorites from several distinct locations in Libya and Algeria. Over the next several years, he and others who followed found at least 400 more meteorites. The find locations were generally in regions known as
regs or
hamadas: flat, featureless areas covered only by small pebbles and minor amounts of sand. Dark-colored meteorites can be easily spotted in these places. In the case of several meteorite fields, such as
Dar al Gani, Dhofar, and others, favorable light-colored geology consisting of
basic rocks (clays,
dolomites, and
limestones) makes meteorites particularly easy to identify. Although meteorites had been sold commercially and collected by hobbyists for many decades, up to the time of the Saharan finds of the late 1980s and early 1990s, most meteorites were deposited in or purchased by museums and similar institutions where they were exhibited and made available for
scientific research. The sudden availability of large numbers of meteorites that could be found with relative ease in places that were readily accessible (especially compared to Antarctica), led to a rapid rise in commercial collection of meteorites. This process was accelerated when, in 1997, meteorites coming from both the Moon and Mars were found in Libya. By the late 1990s, private meteorite-collecting expeditions had been launched throughout the Sahara. Specimens of the meteorites recovered in this way are still deposited in research collections, but most of the material is sold to private collectors. These expeditions have now brought the total number of well-described meteorites found in Algeria and Libya to more than 500.
Northwest Africa Meteorite markets came into existence in the late 1990s, especially in
Morocco. This trade was driven by Western commercialization and an increasing number of collectors. The meteorites were supplied by nomads and local people who combed the deserts looking for specimens to sell. Many thousands of meteorites have been distributed in this way, most of which lack any information about how, when, or where they were discovered. These are the so-called "Northwest Africa" meteorites. When they get classified, they are named "Northwest Africa" (abbreviated NWA) followed by a number. It is generally accepted that NWA meteorites originate in Morocco, Algeria, Western Sahara, Mali, and possibly even further afield. Nearly all of these meteorites leave Africa through Morocco. Scores of important meteorites, including Lunar and Martian ones, have been discovered and made available to science via this route. A few of the more notable meteorites recovered include
Tissint and
NWA 7034. Tissint was the first witnessed Martian meteorite fall in more than fifty years; NWA 7034 is the oldest meteorite known to come from Mars, and is a unique water-bearing regolith breccia.
Arabian Peninsula on
desert pavement,
Rub' al Khali, Saudi Arabia. Probable
chondrite, weight . In 1999, meteorite hunters discovered that the desert in southern and central
Oman were also favorable for the collection of many specimens. The gravel plains in the
Dhofar and
Al Wusta regions of Oman, south of the sandy deserts of the
Rub' al Khali, had yielded about 5,000 meteorites as of mid-2009. Included among these are a large number of
lunar and
Martian meteorites, making Oman a particularly important area both for scientists and collectors. Early expeditions to Oman were mainly done by commercial meteorite dealers, however, international teams of Omani and European scientists have also now collected specimens. The recovery of meteorites from Oman is currently prohibited by national law, but a number of international hunters continue to remove specimens now deemed national treasures. This new law provoked a small
international incident, as its implementation preceded any public notification of such a law, resulting in the prolonged imprisonment of a large group of meteorite hunters, primarily from Russia, but whose party also consisted of members from the US as well as several other European countries. ==In human affairs==