When meteoroids hit the earth what happens?

Answer 1

Meteors hit the earth frequently. Shooting stars are space debris that burns up in the atmosphere, but small pieces often make it through.

Answer 2

A meteor is the glowing streak of light caused when a space rock passes through the Earth's atmosphere and is heated to incandescence by compressive heating and friction. Usually, this either vaporizes the rock or causes it to explode. If any fragments survive the fall and strike the Earth, they are called meteorites.

Answer 3

I don't know where its gone, but i do know that it hit the earth at Mexico. If my English is bad, I'm Dutch:P

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Thousands of meteors hit the Earth's atmosphere every day. Most of them are fairly tiny, the size of a grain of rice or so, but some larger ones do survive the passage through the atmosphere. (Smaller ones become dust, so keep that in mind; when your bookshelf gets dusty, there's your meteors!)

Once a meteor lands, it is called a meteorite. On the ground, they can be difficult to distinguish from all the other scattered rocks. One place that's easy to find meteorites is on Antarctica; a rock sitting on top of the glacial ice probably did not burrow its way up from below!

Barren desert areas like the US Southwest or the Australian Outback are also good hunting grounds.

Answer 4

Yes, it can. If it is very large, it can dig a deep hole for itself and be buried there - such as the meteorite which is thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Smaller meterites may simply remain on the earth's surface - like a stone thrown by a child, or a large rock.

Answer 5

Yes, it could cause a major extinction.On the other hand, in a typical year there are between 18,000 and 80,000 meteorites of 10 grams or more, hit earth. And death from meteorite strike is pretty rare.

Answer 6

Meteors don't pass Earth. A meteor is an item that has entered the Earth's atmosphere and is seen burning up. It is then either completely destroyed or will go through the atmosphere, and then become known as a meteorite. It may land on the ground and be found, or in the sea. Meteors start as bits of dirt, ice, dust or rock in space. If they don't encounter the Earth's atmosphere and become meteors, then they will stay floating in space.

Answer 7

There are a number of locations where we clearly see evidence that a meteorite hit the earth. (A meteorite is a rock originating in space that actually manages to get through the atmosphere and strike the earth.) A couple of the larger or more famous ones are Barringer crater (sometimes called Meteor crater) in Arizona and the now famous Chicxulub crater straddling the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Use the link below to see a list of these and others. Note that this is a Wikipedia post, and each item on the list is a link to the Wikipedia post on that impact event. Lots of things to read, and pictures to see, too!

Answer 8

Define "meteor", and we can discuss it. Probably the largest OBJECT ever to hit the Earth was a planet, perhaps as large as Mars, that collided with the proto-Earth shortly after the formation of the solar system. We believe that the two planets merged, and that the debris from the collision helped to form the Moon. That was about 4.5 billion years ago, when the Earth was newly formed. The collision would have re-made the Earth completely; NOTHING would have survived the impact.

Since then, there have been periodic extinction events in which most species on Earth have been killed off; the most notable may have been the impact event 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs and led to the rise of the mammals, including us. There was another event about 252 million years ago that killed off 95% of all life on Earth.

Answer 9

Lots of meteors have his all over the earth throughout history. However you're probably wondering about the one credited with wiping out the dinosaurs, that one hit in the southern Gulf of Mexico

Answer 10

It depends on the size of the meteorite. Hundreds of small cosmic bodies hit our planet every single day. In general, nothing happens because they are tiny. Ocassionally, a bigger one can smash through somebody's roof or land in a desert for all to see. Very rarely, a huge meteor can destroy - partially or completely - a planet. The force of the impact is thousand times greater than that of any bomb we chose to develop. It can even wipe out certain species (for ex, the disappearance of the dynosaurs is now attributed to a large meteorite which fell onto the Mexican Peninsula approximately 60 million years ago). The consequences are: tidal waves, floods, erruptions, the blackening of the skies which triggers a sort of artificial long winter, which in its turn causes famine, not to mention the fact that the first victims burn, whereas the last ones either freeze to death or die of hunger...