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Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Sam Connolly answered on 17 Jun 2014:
It’s hard to know, because most of the big meteorites hit the earth millions or billions of years ago, so we might not be able to find any evidence of them these days. The biggest one we know of is the Vredefort meteorite, which was an asteroid which hit the Earth in what is now South Africa. It was about 10km wide, which is the size of a small city! The crater it made when it hit is 160 miles wide! So it would have caused a lot of damage at the time! Luckily, asteroid impacts like that are much less common now!
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Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:
Sam beat me to this one! It’s very difficult for us to know because meteorites have been landing on Earth for much longer than there have been people to witness and record them! It also doesn’t help that the Earth is largely covered in water so many large meteorites could have landed in oceans and that makes it difficult for scientists to identify them!
This is what happened with the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico; a large meteorite landed in the sea approximately 64.5 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs, but the crater left on the sea floor from this giant impact wasn’t discovered until recently thanks to a prospecting ship sailing across mapping the sea-floor using seismic waves. Scientists only confirmed this in 2010, despite knowing about the impact for many years beforehand!
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