The heaviest meteorite falls on record

The heaviest observed fall in NASA’s Meteorite Landings dataset (records to 2013) is Sikhote-Alin, an iron that came down in Russia in 1947 and left 23 tonnes of recovered material. That is 45 % of all the mass recovered from the 1,063 observed falls put together. The next largest, Jilin in China (1976), recovered 4 tonnes.

The top twenty

Masses are recovered masses: what was collected and reported in the record. They say nothing direct about the size of the body before it broke up in the atmosphere, and later recoveries are not included.

Only 4 of the twenty are irons. Stones dominate the list, led by the H5 chondrites Jilin and Kunya-Urgench and the carbonaceous Allende. Russia appears 5 times, more than any other country.

A few giants, many small stones

The ten heaviest falls hold 66 % of the recovered mass of all 1,063. The typical fall is far smaller: the median is 2.9 kg, and 324 falls, about 30 %, left less than a kilogram.

Only five falls reached a tonne. On the home page the ten heaviest are drawn to scale, and the gap between Sikhote-Alin and the rest is the first thing that strikes the eye.

The heaviest of each family

Every family has its own record holder, and the spread between them is wide. The heaviest carbonaceous fall outweighs the heaviest L chondrite many times over, although L chondrites are far more numerous.

The five tonne-scale falls

Five falls in the record passed one tonne of recovered material: Sikhote-Alin (Iron, IIAB, Russia, 1947, 23 tonnes); Jilin (H5, China, 1976, 4 tonnes); Allende (CV3, Mexico, 1969, 2 tonnes); Kunya-Urgench (H5, Turkmenistan, 1998, 1.1 tonnes); Norton County (Aubrite, the United States, 1948, 1.1 tonnes). They span half a century and five countries, and only one of them is an iron. Two are H5 chondrites, one is a carbonaceous chondrite and one is an aubrite, a rare achondrite that makes up less than one percent of the falls.

By continent

Every continent has its own heaviest fall, and the medians are closer than the maxima. The typical fall weighs a few kilograms everywhere; the differences sit in the rare large events.

Has the typical fall changed in size?

The table splits the falls by period and gives the median recovered mass and the number of falls that reached 100 kg. The median moves between 2.4 kg and 4 kg across the periods, which is a narrow band given how wide the range of single falls is. The twentieth century has 37 of the 60 falls of 100 kg or more, in line with its large share of all falls.

So the record does not show falls getting larger or smaller over time. What changes from period to period is mostly how many falls were recorded, not how much each one left behind. A heavy fall can happen in any decade, as the decade table above shows.

And at the other end

The lightest recoveries in the record are tiny: Yoshiki (0.1 g, 1928), Vilna (0.1 g, 1967), Silistra (0.1 g, 1917), Hachi-oji (0.2 g, 1817), Chail (0.5 g, 1814). A fall with a few grams of material is still a full entry in the record, with a name, a class and a position, which is why it can sit in the same table as a fall measured in tonnes.

Where the heavy falls landed

In all, 60 falls recovered 100 kg or more. Russia has 11 of them and the United States 9, followed by China with 5 and Australia with 4. By family the heavy set is mostly ordinary chondrites (19 H, 15 L and 6 LL), with 7 irons and 4 carbonaceous falls.

The heaviest fall of every decade

Each decade has its own record holder. Some are famous, others are known mainly to specialists, and the masses range from tens of kilograms to tonnes.

Since 2000 the heaviest recoveries in the record are Sulagiri (2008, 110 kg), Chelyabinsk (2013, 100 kg), Chergach (2007, 100 kg), Tamdakht (2008, 100 kg) and Mahadevpur (2007, 71 kg). None of them comes close to the tonne-scale falls of the twentieth century.

Reading big numbers with care

Two falls can differ in recovered mass simply because one landed in open farmland and the other in forest or water, or because one was searched for weeks and the other for an afternoon. The record cannot separate these effects from the size of the meteoroid. For the same reason, a ranking by recovered mass is a ranking of what people collected and reported.

Finds follow different rules. The largest finds, led by Hoba, outweigh every observed fall; they are listed separately on the giant finds page, and the falls versus finds note explains the difference.