Say hello to your new favorite time-suck. (Pew pew pew!)
It's called Bolides. Its creator, datavisualization designer Carlo Zapponi, calles Bolides "an attempt to visualize and explore the meteorites that have collided with the Earth." The visualization focuses primarily on "fell" meteorites – i.e. meteorites that were observed by people or automated devices during their fall to Earth:
Most meteorite falls are recovered on the basis of eye-witness accounts of the fireball or the impact of the object on the ground. Meteorites fall with virtually equal probability everywhere on the Earth, eye-witnessed meteorites tend to be concentrated in areas with high human population densities such as Europe, Japan, and northern India.
Bolides is more than an animation. Using data from The Meteorite Bulletin, Zapponi has also made the infographic interactive (though conspicuously absent from the dataset is this year's Chelyabinsk meteorite). You can pause the animation, for example, or hover over specific dates for details on individual meteorites, including its classification, place and year of discovery, its mass, and more. It's really, really well done.
Check it the full interactive animation, along with more information on Zapponi's project, over at bolid.es.
[bolid.es via Popular Science]