Meteorite History Map

Recorded meteorite falls and finds on a world timeline — drag the year, or press play

Runs fully in your browser — the dataset loads once as a static file, nothing you do is sent anywhere

Trail Min mass

Hover for details

1990

Change the display mode with the switch above

Circle size = mass (log scale) Observed fall Find (year of discovery) Fireball (layer)

Data: NASA Open Data: Meteorite Landings (The Meteoritical Society) — public domain · Fireballs: NASA/JPL CNEOS Fireball Data API ·

Tips

Press Play and Watch the Hunt Unfold

The timeline tells a story of discovery, not just of falls: scattered 19th-century falls across Europe and India, then Antarctica lighting up as expedition teams begin collecting in the 1970s, then the Sahara and the Omani desert joining in the 1990s. Where meteorites appear says as much about where people searched as about where they landed.

Circle Size Is Mass — on a Vast Scale

The recorded masses span nine orders of magnitude, from gram-sized fragments to the 60-tonne Hoba iron in Namibia, so circle sizes follow a logarithmic scale. Use the mass filter to hide small fragments and let the giants stand out.

Orange Means Seen Falling, Blue Means Found Later

Orange circles are "falls" — meteorites someone actually watched streak down, barely 1,100 in all of recorded history. Blue circles are "finds", picked up later on deserts and ice fields. Toggle each group on and off to compare the two very different maps they draw.

The Fireball Layer: Visitors That Burned Up

Turn on the fireball layer to add bright atmospheric fireballs detected by U.S. Government sensors since 1988 — most of them objects that never reached the ground. It also picks up where the meteorite catalog ends, extending the picture to the present day.

Common Use Cases

🏫

Space Science and Geography Class

Play the timeline and ask the class why Antarctica suddenly floods with blue dots in the 1970s. The answer — dark stones on white ice, and dedicated expeditions — teaches how science actually gets done.

📚

Looking Up a Meteorite You Know

Chelyabinsk 2013, Sutter's Mill 2012, the Peekskill fall of 1992 that famously dented a parked car — jump to the year and see the event in its true place and scale, alongside everything else recorded that era.

🗞️

News Background Research

When a fireball or a fresh fall makes headlines, check the record: how often meteorites have been recovered in that region, and how the new event compares in mass to historic ones.

🔭

Fuel for Stargazing Curiosity

Meteor showers are a spectacle, but this map shows the rarer sequel: the stones that made it down. Browsing where and when they landed is a natural next step after a night of watching the sky.

📊

Data Storytelling

Writers and educators can frame scenes like the Antarctic collection rush or the desert-hunting boom of the 1990s — with the timeline, filters, and map position set exactly how they want.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does the data come from?

Meteorites come from the open catalog published on the NASA Open Data Portal, compiled by The Meteoritical Society — the international authority that validates and names every recognized meteorite. Fireballs come from the NASA/JPL Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. Sources and edition are shown under the map.

Why does the catalog end around 2013?

The openly licensed NASA snapshot of the meteorite catalog was last compiled in 2013, and later editions are not published under comparable terms. The fireball layer, which is updated continuously, covers the years since — so the map still reaches the present day.

What is the difference between a fall and a find?

A fall (orange) was observed coming down and collected soon after, so its date is the actual day it landed. A find (blue) was discovered later — sometimes centuries later — and its date is the year of discovery, not of arrival. That is why finds cluster wherever searching is easy, like deserts and Antarctic ice.

Why are so many meteorites in Antarctica?

Not because more land there — falls are spread evenly over the planet. Dark rocks are simply easy to spot on white ice, and the slow flow of the ice sheet concentrates them in certain blue-ice areas. Systematic expeditions since the 1970s have recovered tens of thousands of specimens there.

Are falling meteorites dangerous?

Direct hits are extraordinarily rare — the best-documented case is Ann Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, bruised in 1954 by a stone that crashed through her roof, and no death has ever been confirmed in modern records. The realistic hazard is the shockwave of a large fireball: the 2013 Chelyabinsk event injured about 1,500 people, mostly through shattered window glass.

What do the classifications mean?

The popup shows each meteorite's scientific class in broad groups: stony chondrites (by far the most common, nearly unchanged since the solar system formed), achondrites (from bodies that melted, including pieces of the Moon and Mars), irons (fragments of destroyed planetary cores), and stony-irons.

Is anything sent to a server while I browse?

No. The meteorite and fireball data are downloaded once as static files and everything — the timeline, the map, the popups — runs entirely in your browser.