On the chances of finding a new meteorite

Have you ever found a "fresh" meteorite? To put it bluntly, probably not0. But how likely is it that you will ever find one?

Contrary to what you might think, meteorite falls are not super rare events. About 100 tons of extraterrestrial material fall to Earth every day, but most of that is microscopic dust. Larger dust grains up to the size of a pebble burn up completely when they enter the Earth's atmosphere at more than 11 kilometers per second.

From fist-sized stones up to large boulders, they burn up only partially (forming the characteristic black crust), with a variable surviving fraction reaching the ground as one or many meteorites. All meteorites (>50 g) together sum up to only a couple of tons per year world-wide, in 12'000 to 25'000 individual fall events0.

If you translate that into a fall rate (the Earth's surface being 500 million square kilometers), you get 0.000024 to 0.00005 falls per square kilometer and year. So say you live for 80 years and perfectly monitor the same square kilometer every year of your life, you have only a 1:250 to 1:500 chance to find a (>50 g) meteorite!

Or, turning it around, you'd have to (perfectly!) monitor 250-500 square kilometers each year for 80 years to have decent chance to find one. In other words, your chances of randomly running into a freshly fallen meteorite are pretty bad. Sorry. And that's even before we acknowledge that perfectly monitoring a surface is hard...

Indeed, >99.9% of all meteorites are never found. The Meteoritical Bulletin Database lists only five confirmed or probable "falls" recovered in 2025 , 10 in 2024, 14 in 2023, and 12 in 2022. There are more finds (i.e., not witnessed to fall), but these are mostly from organized search campaigns. But why is finding them so hard?

To start with, 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by oceans. Meteorites falling into open water are near-impossible to find ( a meteorite that fell into Lake Michigan in 2017 is still missing ). Subtracting these, that still leaves 3600 to 7500 individual meteorite fall events per year (>50 g) over the continents.

Even there, forested and agriculturally used areas, with their abundant vegetation and ground cover, are difficult meteorite hunting grounds, as are mountain areas with their rocky ground and steep slopes. Most search campagins therefore focus on flat, bright deserts and ice sheets (in particular, Antarctica), where they are easy to see.

Low precipitation in these environments also reduces the destruction of meteorites by weathering, mainly from the oxidation of iron, allowing the meteorites to accumulate over time. In the Atacama desert in Chile, meteorites with terrestrial ages of almost 1 million years (Ma) have been found0, and up to 3 Ma0 for Antarctica.

So if you can collect meteorites for 1 Ma, you get 24 to 50 meteorites (>50 g) per square kilometer - much better! In Antarctica, the ice flows also concentrate the meteorites near mountain ranges (" blue ice areas "), further improving the chances. No wonder that >60% of all known meteorites are now from Antarctica!

In summary, the chance of randomly finding a meteorite, outside of an organized search campaign in Antarctica or a desert region, is very low. Which doesn't mean it hurts to keep an open eye. After all, you just might get lucky, and be the first human ever to touch a certain piece of rock from deep time and space.