Arts said:
Thousands of meteorites have collided with the Earth since 2500 BC. 45,716 have been recorded. Only 1,107 have been seen falling
I’m guessing here, but I think there may have been 1 or 2 meteorite impacts that were seen, but no record was made of the sighting, or the record has been lost, or the record exists but they didn’t find it.
That’s startlingly uniform between 1810 and 2010. I would have expected that with better reporting from Africa and Asia the numbers reported as being seen would have increased recently. Even Australia has only recently started an automated watch for meteorite falls.
I always wonder about what exactly “number of meteorites” means in statistics like these. In most falls the meteor breaks up on its passage through the atmosphere so one observation will often result in five meteorites, and sometimes many more. So is a collection of meteorites in a single fall counted as one or five?
Another observational bias is that about half of all meteorites found after an observed fall are iron meteorites, even though iron meteorites comprise only about 1-2% of all meteorites. The reason is that iron meteorites are far easier to identify as meteorites when on the ground, the much more common ordinary chondrites can just look like rocks, especially if they bury themselves in the ground.