jivehoneyjive – Member
I’m no expert on this phenomenon… does exploding stuff from space completely vaporize, or are there traceable fragments?
As someone said, depends. Tens of thousands of objects enter our atmosphere every single day, most are the size of sand grains, or fine gravel. If they’re stony chondrites, they’re most likely to burn up, unless they’re really large, in which case they can explode, and the larger fragments hit the ground.
There are stony-iron meteorites, pallasites and mesosiderites, both of which pretty rare, and there are iron meteorites, which can be found fairly often, especially on open smooth deserts and salt-flats, and snow/ice-fields.
High-quality swords were sometimes forged from meteoric iron, and much treasured.
Really big, ***-off sized meteors, and small asteroidal bodies also hit the earth, and leave sodding great marks on the surface, like the Arizona crater, or the Chicxulub impact site on the Yucatán Peninsula, which is 25,450 sq.km.
And was probably the main culprit behind the last dinosaur extinction, although that was a fairly drawn-out process.