Where Space Rocks Land: Falls, Finds and the Geography of the Meteorite Record

Meteorites reach the ground at a rate that is close to uniform over the Earth, but the catalogue of known meteorites is anything but uniform. I map the 45,715 meteorites recovered on Earth in NASA's copy of the Meteoritical Society's Meteoritical Bulletin Database (records to 2013), and separate the 1,107 witnessed falls (2.4%) from the 44,608 finds. Finds are dominated by places where meteorites are easy to see and slow to weather: 65% of all records come from Antarctica and 24% from hot deserts (the Sahara 15%, Arabia 7%), so that ice and desert together account for 89% of the record, almost all of it collected since 1969. Witnessed falls behave differently: none is recorded in Antarctica, where an even spread would predict about 92, and 96% fall outside the ice and desert collection areas. Compared with an even spread over the land, Europe records 2.2 times its share of falls, Africa 0.6, South America 0.4 and Oceania 0.3; Japan, Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom each record more than ten times their share. Across countries, falls per unit area rise with population density (correlation on log scales 0.62). Witnessed falls grew from 17 in the 1800s to a peak of 91 in the 1930s and have since levelled at about 59 a decade. The heaviest meteorites (Hoba, Cape York, Campo del Cielo) are all iron finds, and irons make up 27% of finds outside ice and desert against 4.4% of falls. The map of meteorites is, above all, a map of where people have looked. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/meteorite-falls/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/meteorite-falls. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/meteorite-falls/. Meteorite data: The Meteoritical Society, Meteoritical Bulletin Database, as published by NASA's Open Data Portal.