How to Find a Meteorite in 5 Steps

A chrondite meteorite in situ in Rub' al Khali, Saudi Arabia.

(Image credit: Creative Commons | Meteorite Recon)

Earth is under constant bombardment by space rocks. When they crash and burn through the atmosphere, most of the debris gets lost to the oceans, while some is buried or gradually weathered away. Nonetheless, plenty of chunks of fallen meteors, or meteorites, are strewn across the accessible parts of the planet. So far, more than 40,000 meteorites have been found and catalogued, and countless more are still out there, waiting to be chanced upon.

If you need further incentive for finding something that was forged at the birth of our sun and contains secrets about the nature of our solar system, there's this: Space rocks are worth as much as $1,000 per gram. The following tips will get you started on your search, but be warned: This extraterrestrial treasure hunt requires hard work and dedication.

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The law is ambiguous regarding ownership of meteorites found on the 264 million acres of public lands, mostly in the American West (and including many of the country's meteorite hotspots), that are managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). According to Bob Verish, a meteorite recovery expert who has found hundreds of meteorites, some BLM offices consider meteorites to be artifacts, and thus regard them as government property, but the vast majority of BLM offices do not. It's a pretty safe bet that any meteorites found on public lands will be yours to keep, Verish said — "so just go ahead and meteorite hunt."

The best hunting grounds are large, barren expanses where a dark rock — meteorites tend to be blackish — is easy to spot. Deserts, such as Southern California's Mojave Desert, and icy regions, such as Antarctica, are ideal. "Furthermore, the dry conditions in all of these regions (even Antarctica) help preserve the specimens — i.e., they are less altered by liquid water," Rubin told Life's Little Mysteries.

You can also search in "strewn fields," or zones where meteorites from a single space rock were dispersed as it broke up during atmospheric entry. There are well-known strewn fields located near New Mexico's Glorieta Mountain, as well as Holbrook and Franconia in Arizona. Since 1995, thousands of stony meteorites have also been recovered in what appears to be two overlapping strewn fields in Gold Basin, Ariz.

Furthermore, when a newly fallen meteorite can be matched with the trajectory of the meteor that deposited it, this enables scientists to determine both its mineral content and what part of space it originated from. In the same vein as sending a space probe to an asteroid or comet and collecting a sample — but infinitely cheaper — finding a meteorite whose incoming trajectory is known can reveal fresh information about the structure and composition of a distant region of the solar system.

So, when a new fireball is spotted screeching toward Earth's surface, how do you go about finding the meteorites it deposited along its path? Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, said you need to identify the ground below an incoming meteor's "dark flight" — the part of its trajectory after it slows below 3 or 4 kilometers per second, at which point it no longer burns and produces light.

Recently, Marc Fries of the Carnegie Institute of Washington developed a technique to locate falls without the need for a precise trajectory or dark flight. Fries uses Doppler weather radar to detect a "rain" of meteoritic particles falling to the ground, permitting rapid location of meteorite fall zones. It was this technique that defined the fall area for the California meteorite and led to Ward's find. Fries' blog, Radar Obs of Meteor Events, is "perhaps THE URL for a meteorite hunter to check," Cooke wrote.

However, Verish said the best meteorite hunters "find them by eye." Not only can you cover more ground if you're not blindly waving a wand back and forth, but some of the more elusive and thus more remarkable types of meteorites do not contain metal, and can be discovered only by carefully scouring the ground for odd-looking rocks. "These are lunar meteorites, Martian meteorites and igneous meteorites (achondrites) derived from asteroids (essentially basalts)," Rubin wrote.

If you spot what you think might be a specimen from space, ask yourself these questions: Is the rock black or brown? Is it solid, without pores, and dense compared to most other rocks in the area? If a corner of the sample is ground slightly, is the interior metallic silver? (If there is no grinding, don't grind it). Is the sample magnetic? If you answered yes to all of these questions, you probably have a genuine, 4.5-billion-year-old piece of the cosmos.

Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics.