Explanation:
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.
The week marks the
100th anniversary of humans first reaching the Earth's South Pole.
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