Where is the best place to find meteorites?
Hot and cold deserts are best: dry conditions preserve meteorites for thousands of years and dark stones stand out on pale ground. Antarctica's blue ice and the Sahara have produced most of the world's meteorites.
Meteorites fall fairly evenly over the whole planet, but they are far easier to find in some places than others. The ideal hunting ground has three things: a light, uniform surface where dark stones stand out, very few ordinary rocks to confuse things, and a climate dry enough that meteorites survive for a long time before rusting away.
Antarctica is the champion. Moving ice concentrates meteorites in certain blue-ice areas, and dark rocks on white ice are easy to spot. Organised expeditions there have recovered tens of thousands of specimens, though collecting is restricted to approved scientific programmes.
Hot deserts come next. The Sahara, including regions of Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Mauritania, has yielded thousands of meteorites, many sold under the label NWA, short for Northwest Africa. The gravel plains of Oman, Chile's Atacama Desert, and Australia's Nullarbor Plain are also famous. In these places meteorites can lie on the surface for tens of thousands of years or longer.
Dry lake beds in the American Southwest, and the snowfields and farmland where a fresh fall has just happened, are other good bets. In fact, following a newly tracked fireball is one of the most exciting ways to find a meteorite, because you know roughly where to look. Wherever you search, the rules matter as much as the geography. Always get the landowner's permission, and check national and local laws: some countries claim all meteorites as state property, and many national parks and protected areas forbid collecting entirely. In green, wet places such as Britain, meteorites weather fast and hide in vegetation, so finds are rare.