How many meteorites strike the Earth each year?
Every year, millions of rocky shards from space burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, many of which quickly flare up and appear in the sky as "shooting stars." But how many of them survive their high-speed plunges to the ground? Meteorites are space rocks that crash down on Earth. Giant impacts, such as the one that likely terminated the dinosaurs' rule approximately 66 million years ago, are extremely rare. They are generated by an asteroid or comet measuring roughly 6 miles (10 kilometers) large. Instead, the majority of rocks that fall to Earth are quite tiny, and only a handful survive their explosive descent through the Earth's atmosphere.
Scientists estimate that fewer than 10,000 meteorites collide with Earth's land or water each year, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the moon, which lacks an atmosphere and is hit by varying sizes of space rocks: approximately 11 to 1,100 tons (10 to 1,000 metric tons) of space rock dust per day, and approximately 33,000 pingpong-ball-sized space rock collisions yearly.
Meteoroids, tiny asteroids, or the tiniest components of the solar system, are the space rocks that frequently end up as meteorites. According to the American Meteor Society, they range in size from rocks roughly 3 feet (1 meter) across to micrometeoroids the size of dust grains (AMS). Meteoroids are often asteroids or comet debris. Some, though, may be debris ejected by planets or moons. According to the Meteoritical Society, there are over 300 confirmed meteorites that started as fragments of Mars.
Meteoroids are blazing, falling rocks that burn up as they pass through Earth's atmosphere due to air friction and emit streaks of light across the sky. According to the AMS, a fireball is a highly brilliant meteor. Every day, thousands of fireballs flare across the Earth's sky, although the majority of them occur over the oceans and uninhabited areas, and many are obscured by daytime.
According to Gonzalo Tancredi, an astronomer at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, the majority of Earth's recorded meteors "come from meteor showers associated with comet dust." Meteor showers, on the other hand, do not create meteorites because the meteoroids in such showers are usually too brittle to survive the fall to the ground.
Tancredi used Meteoritical Society statistics to determine how many meteorites reach Earth successfully each year. There were 95 reports of meteorites falling to Earth between 2007 and 2018, average roughly 7.9 reports each year. It's hard to say how many meteors fall into the water and sink to the bottom unnoticed. Land, on the other hand, covers 29% of the Earth's surface. Urban areas, which house around 55% of the population, account for approximately 0.44% of the land area.
Tancredi calculated that the overall number of terrestrial meteorites falling over Earth was about equal to the number of meteorites recorded in urban areas divided by the proportion of Earth's geography covered by urban sprawl. Overall, he concluded that there are around 6,100 meteorite falls each year over the entire Earth and approximately 1,800 over land.
Tancredi stated that space rocks around 33 feet (10 meters) broad are projected to hit Earth's atmosphere every six to ten years. A rock large enough to cause an explosion similar to the 1908 Tunguska event in Russia occurs once every 500 years, he noted. A massive cosmic impact from a rock 3,280 feet (1 km) broad is anticipated to occur every 300,000 to 500,000 years, but a collision like the one that terminated the Cretaceous epoch and killed the dinosaurs is estimated to occur once every 100 million to 200 million years.