LANDED METEORITES ON EARTH is a data visualisation project where we experimented with coding to represent NASA's information on all of the known meteorite landings.

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Copyright © 2022 Carla Fernández Arce & Giampaolo Zirone

LANDED METEORITES ON EARTH

Meteorites drawing our world

A snapshot of the most prevalent compositions
in the last 600 years

Each click represents 100 years starting in 1400 and ending in 2013.
The number of sides in the polygons increases every centenary.
The size of the figures indicates the total mass of meteorites
The color of the polygons represents the composition of the meteorites.

  • 1400-1499
  • 1500-1599
  • 1600-1699
  • 1700-1799
  • 1800-1899
  • 1900-1999
  • 2000-2013

Chrondrites

L6 | L5 | L4 | L3 | CM2 | CM1 | CM4 | EH3 | EH4 | EH5

Stony Meteorites that have not been modified, by either melting or differentiation of the parent body.
They are formed when various types of dust and small grains in the early Solar System accreted to form primitive asteroids.

Achondrites

IIIAB | IIAB | IAB-MG | IVA

Meteorites consisting of materials from asteroids, Mars and the Moon that does not contain chondrules.
They are igneous, meaning at some point they were melted into magma. Most of all are irony, some are stony and others are mixed.

More than 600 years of landing meteorites

NASA's data from 1400 to 2013

Total OF METEORITES LANDED in each country

El Salvador is the country with the largest number of landed meterorites between 1400 and 2013. Followed by Lithuania, Serbia and the United States of America.

sum of the meteorites mass with the same chemical composition

IIIAB and IAB-MG, both achondrites, are considerably the material compositions with the heavier total weight.

About the information

The data we used for the visualisation comes from one dataset accessible in the NASA’s Open Data Portal. The Meteorite Landings is comprehensive data set from The Meteoritical Society that contains information on all of the known meteorite landings. We accessed it on Wednesday 1st June 2022.
The selection of data took into account landing meteorites from the year 1400 since the data set only included one meteorite landing in 921 and one in 861. We also deleted 289 meteorite fields that had no year.
To complete the preparation and data cleaning we used the free version of OpenCage Geocoding API which allowed us to convert coordinates into locations. 27,695 meteorites were not located either because the dataset included no coordinates or the API responded without information. We used the country names to sum the landing meteorites of the same country and the continent names to differentiate them with colours (D3 map). We wanted to use the continent name for changing the region of the D3 diagrams, this is still in process.
To further develop our data analysis and narrative creation we needed to learn more about meteorites. Therefore we accessed the following pages: Meteorites Classification and Meteorites.

If you want to have access to the whole dataset or if you want to have further information please get in touch with us, we will be happy to give you all the information
Work developed with Llewelyn Fernandes' support during the MA in Data Visualisation, UAL.