This skips a beautiful animation that renders the strikes of 30,000 meteorites on the world map starting from the year 860 to 2013.

Reload the page to enjoy the animation.

What are Meteorites?

A meteorite is a meteoroid (a piece of an asteroid or comet) that survives the passage through the Earth's atmosphere and lands on the earth.

How often do Meteorites strike?

Almost everyday our planet is bombarded with tons of small particles and dust some of which our atmosphere protects our planet from.

About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface.

Every 2,000 years or so, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth and causes significant damage to the area.

Only once every few million years, an object large enough to threaten Earth's civilization comes along. Impact craters on Earth, the moon and other planetary bodies are evidence of these occurrences.

It is believed that anything larger than half mile in diameter could have worldwide effects.

Weighing in at 66 tons, the largest known meteorite found is Hoba in Namibia, Africa.

Important Notes

The original data set had entries for over 45000 meteorites. After processing and cleaning the data for sanity, the following meteorites were excluded from the visualization which finally resulted in about 34000 meteorites.

• A few entries here contain date information that was incorrectly parsed into the NASA database and so any date that is before 860 CE or after 2016 are incorrect and have been trimmed.
• A few entries have latitude and longitude of 0N/0E (off the western coast of Africa, where it would be quite difficult to recover meteorites). Many of these were actually discovered in Antarctica, but exact coordinates were not given. 0N/0E locations have been excluded from this visualization.
• In the cases where the data set has multiple masses for the same meteorite(or family) in the same year and location, the one with the largest mass (the rest could be burnt up fragments of the same meteorite) alone has been considered for this visualization.
• In the population density view, the data for some islands and Antarctica are not available and Antarctica was imputed with a lighter scale value and the rest of the islands were not considered for this imputation.

Population Density View

While the first view illustrates the meteorite strikes on the world map, this view gives an emphasis on the population density of those regions to visualize the effect of meteorite strikes on human life.

This view lightens the areas of the world with intensity proportional to the population. Antarctica is an exception as based on the scale of population density, it should not even show up. Although it currently has a floating research population it has imputed in the map for the sake of sanity.

The data for population density has been procured from the World Bank website and and the numbers are from the year 2016. While the numbers might not be indicative of the actual population density at the time of meteorite strike, this view attempts to analyze a new aspect of the visualization - whether we can draw a parallel between the population density and the number of meteorites found. Moreover, this view could also provide caution to countries where a meteorite strike is expected.

About the Data

The primary data used in this visualization comes from NASA's Data Portal, and is based on The Meteoritical Society's Meteoritical Bulletin Database (this latter database provides additional information such as meteorite images, links to primary sources, etc.).

Data Sources

• NASA's Data Portal
• The World Bank

Technology

The visualization is created using, HTML, D3 and JavaScript.