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Meteorites wreck into Earth somewhat much forever , and you could happen their ancient remains everywhere fromKing Tut ’s tombtosome guy cable ’s farmin Edmore , Michigan . But to well translate where these space rocks came from and how long they ’ve been live as earthly expats , it help to visit the densest collecting of meteorites on the planet — and that ’s in Chile ’s Atacama Desert .
What ’s so particular about Atacama ? For starters , it ’s onetime — more than 15 million years quondam — and that intend the meteors that have smash - landed on its 50,000 - straight - nautical mile ( 130,000 second power klick ) control surface have the possible action of being really quondam , too . This poses a geologic advantage over other comeuppance , including Antarctica , which boast vast supplies of meteorites , but are by and large too immature to house any place John Rock older than about half a million days , fit in to Alexis Drouard , a investigator at Aix - Marseille Université in France and lead author of a young field of study in thejournal Geology . [ In Images : Stunning Flower Fields of the Atacama Desert ]
Chile’s Atacama Desert is the driest, oldest desert on Earth. It’s also home to one of the planet’s most ancient collection of meteorites.
Drouard and his co-worker recently go on a meteorite - hunting trip to the Atacama Desert in hope of retrieve an raiment of rocks that span 1000000 of yr . " Our purpose in this study was to see how the meteorite flux to Earth changed over declamatory timescales,“Drouard said in a statement . In other words , could the blank space rocks of Atacama reveal when Earth was bombarded by meteorite more or less frequently ?
For the new cogitation ( published May 22 ) , the investigator collected nigh 400meteoritesand closely studied 54 of them , analyzing both the ages and chemical substance compositions of the exotic stones . Consistent with the desert ’s innovative geezerhood , about 30 % of the meteorites were more than 1 million years honest-to-god , while two of them had been garner dust for more than 2 million years . According to Drouard , this represents the oldest meteorite solicitation on Earth ’s surface .
And as for the meteorite flux ? The team extrapolated the issue of their small sample distribution to determine that shock activity has remain relatively constant over the past 2 million year , total to about 222 meteor impacts in every substantial kilometre of desert every 1 million years .
Surprisingly , the composition of the meteorite deepen more drastically . According to the researchers , the meteorites that bombarded Atacama between 1 million and half a million age ago were significantlymore iron - richthan the rocks that fell before or after . It ’s possible they all follow from a single swarm of stones that got knocked loose from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter , the team wrote .
Originally published onLive Science .
