Every meteorite fall on earth mapped

[jberryhill]

24. That makes no sense at all

If you want to find meteorites, it is more important to go somewhere where they will most easily be found. That will bear no relationship to where they most frequently strike - even if they did strike more frequently in one place than another.

For example, let's say that meteors were more likely to fall in the Okefenokee swamp than an area the same size on the Great Plains.

Where will you be most likely to find them?

The answer is not in the swamp, because you will not find them in the swamp. This was one of the frustrations of the various expeditions which attempted to find an object associated with the Tunguska event. The area is a great big bog.

A fantastic place where it is very easy to find meteorites are ice-covered plains of Antarctica. It is dead bang simple, since any rock on top of the ice didn't come up from underneath it, and thus must have come from above. You don't need a metal detector or any other analysis equipment or skill. Any rock you find on top of a thousand feet of ice is a meteorite. This is also why sand dunes are a good place to look.

You don't find frequent reports of finding them there (although a lot of them are, indeed, found there), because there aren't a whole lot of people hanging around in Antarctica.

But the notion that there is any place on earth more likely to get hit than another is a facially difficult hypothesis, given that they can come from any direction at any time, and the earth spins. It's like asking whether a bullet shot at a tire of a moving car is more or less likely to hit near the brand name of the tire. Earth features have no relationship to the mechanism by which meteors approach the earth. Even if you go for exotic mechanisms like induced currents in metallic rocks interacting with the earth's magnetic field on the way in, or magnetic rocks directly interacting with the earth's magnetic field, the forces involved are going to have zero influence on the momentum of the rock. Likewise, local magnetic or gravitational anomalies are "anomalous" to a very small degree, which will have utterly no effect on a rock coming in at a couple hundred miles per hour. It's like asking whether hitting a fly slows down a race car.