Searching for Meteorites in Antarctica
Where is the best place on Earth to find meteorites ? Although meteors fall all over the world, they usually just sink to the bottom of an ocean , are buried by shifting terrain, or are easily confused with terrestrial rocks . At the bottom of the Earth, however, in East Antarctica , huge sheets of blue ice remain pure and barren. When traversing such a sheet, a dark rock will stick out . These rocks have a high probability of being true meteorites -- likely pieces of another world. An explosion or impact might have catapulted these meteorites from the Moon , Mars , or even an asteroid , yielding valuable information about these distant worlds and our early Solar System . Small teams of snowmobiling explorers so far have found thousands. Pictured above , ice-trekkers search a field 25-kilometers in front of Otway Massif in the Transantarctic Mountain Range during the Antarctic summer of 1995-1996.