The flux of meteorites on the Earth's surface

• Published in: Meteoritics
• Main Authors: Halliday, Ian, Blackwell, Alan T., Griffin, Arthur A.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 1989
• Subjects: General Earth and Planetary Sciences; General Environmental Science; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1945-5100.1989.tb00959.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1945-5100.1989.tb00959.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1945-5100.1989.tb00959.x

Abstract— We derive values for the number and size distributions of meteorites landing on Earth from a study of photographic observations of bright fireballs with the Canadian camera network. The observations cover 11 years from 1974 to 1985. This analysis is an extension of a previous study and represents a 30% increase in the data base. The cumulative plot of numbers vs estimated mass of the largest fragment for each event shows a change in slope near 0.6 kg due to a deficiency of small meteorites surviving from the group of slow fireballs. The change can be explained by a mass dependence of the fraction of the incoming object that survives as the largest fragment. For larger falls, the main mass appears to represent a decreasing fraction of the total mass of the surviving meteorites and estimates of these effects are used to derive the final distribution of both main masses and total masses of meteoritic events. For total masses greater than 1 kg the population index is 1.82, close to previous estimates. About 9 events per year drop at least 1 kg of meteorites in an area of a million square km and the same area receives an annual influx of 54 kg from meteorite events with total masses between 0.01 and 100 kg. There is sufficient confidence in these results that they may be used for comparison of the present flux of meteorites with values inferred for other times, in particular the long accumulation times of the Antarctic meteorite collections.