Animated Graphic Tracks Meteorites on Earth

A cool animated graphic tracks meteorites that have collided with Earth focusing on ones that were seen falling and then hitting the ground. The animated visualization is called Bolides which was designed by Carlo Zapponi, who wrote in an email to Yahoo News when he stumbled upon the dataset provided by Visualizing.org from the Meteoritical Society.

He got excited by the amount and quality of the information he discovered.

Zapponi points out on the Bolides site as of 2013, only 1, 046 meteorites were seen, but 34, 842 have actually been found around the globe.

According to Zapponi, while they fall everywhere, those that were seen tend to be in areas with large populations, such as Europe, Japan and northern India.

Meteroites-‘debris from space that falls to Earth, usually in a fiery blaze-‘ are few and far between. And they’re especially rare to witness. But over the millennia, they add up.

The word “bolide” comes from Greek “????? bolis,” which means missile. Astronomers tend to use bolide to identify an exceptionally bright fireball, particularly one that explodes.

The data of meteorites had conveniently been compiled by Visualizing.org.

When you click on the Bolides image, you can find out more details on each meteor on the timeline, which dates back to the year 861 A.D. and goes right through 2013.

Zapponi first explored the data and the idea of visualizing just came naturally.

Source: news.yahoo.com