Globally Recorded Meteorite Landings/Findings (1500-2013)

A few years ago I made, what I thought, was a pretty cool visualisation of global meteor landings at Ito World. We experimented with data driven sound and a few more fancy effects and the results was pretty impactful (excuse the pun).

This year I wanted to update this visualisation and migrate it to Houdini to take advantage of a more powerful and impressive level of visualisation. The final video is below which I am super pleased with. However, when I posted it on Twitter, amidst the sarcastic remarks about ‘so meteors don’t land in the sea’, a few folk took issue with it being misleading.

Obviously posting to social media means people can willingly offer critique, something which I am happy to receive but it kind of hurts when someone accuses you of misleading an audience, something I would never set out to do.

It made me think about a few aspects, perhaps I need to be clearer in describing what this was. What is obvious to me may not be obvious to someone else in terms of these meteorites being the only recorded ones found.

With this in mind the visualisation caveated with the following:

• The meteors visualised are those ‘recorded’. This explains the increase activity with date and the lack of meteors in the oceans

• The data is sourced from NASA’s Open Data Portal: https://data.nasa.gov/Space-Science/Meteorite-Landings/ak9y-cwf9

• The visualisation was a side-project I did for fun to test out some new visualisation concepts

I also experimented with some concepts for visualising Global Earthquakes. I really like the idea of providing two global views of the earth with one rotated 180 degrees so you get a full picture of the coverage of events.