Do meteorites bury themselves when they land?
Most small meteorites land at a few hundred kilometres per hour and make only a shallow pit. Larger or iron ones can penetrate deeper, especially in soft ground.
Most meteorites lose almost all their cosmic speed in the atmosphere. By the time they reach the ground, they are falling at their terminal velocity, roughly 200 to 400 kilometres per hour for stones the size of a fist to a football. At that speed, they behave like a heavy stone dropped from an aircraft, not like a bullet.
Typical impact. A small stony meteorite landing on soil usually makes a small pit, a few centimetres to tens of centimetres deep, sometimes with a little spray of soil around it. On hard ground, rock or concrete, it may bounce or shatter. Winchcombe broke into many fragments on a driveway in 2021.
Larger meteorites. Bigger stones fall faster and dig deeper. The largest Sikhote-Alin iron masses, which fell in Russia in 1947, blasted out craters up to about 26 metres across. The Chelyabinsk meteorite's biggest fragment, about 650 kilograms, broke through ice on Lake Chebarkul and sank into the mud at the bottom, from where it was recovered later that year.
Iron meteorites. Being dense and strong, irons can penetrate deeper into soft ground than stones of similar size.
Very large impacts. Only asteroids large enough to keep much of their cosmic speed, typically tens of metres or more, make true impact craters, such as Meteor Crater in Arizona.
Over time. Soil processes, ploughing, earthworms and erosion can bury meteorites or bring them to the surface. Searchers sometimes find meteorites in molehills or ploughed furrows.