Note the large number of strikes in the Sahara desert (and Antarctica, as someone else noted).
There are at least two things going on here, probably more:
1) Population density
2) Ease of finding the meteorite or crater (this is easier in barren areas with relatively homogeneous terrain, like the desert and Antartica).
Yup... I don't think anyone is going to argue that Australia in fact has a higher population density than China.
In fact, the effects of 2) are reinforced even more, since my guess is that many, if not the majority of these findings were by scientific studies/surveys (note that they typically list the date found, not the date it occured). And since no one likes wasting their time, they would obviously pick areas where it would be easiest to find evidence.
You right, but I still see this map as a catalogue of found meteors, rather than an informative visualisation. To make your observations clear, you need to normalise this heatmap by the population density.
It depends on what you're after. What you're suggesting would would also distort the data, but in a different way -- it'd make it look like Antarctica was far more likely to get hit than it actually is.
One would expect the true distribution to be extremely uniform, right?
However, there could be a favoured plane of arrival, like the solar system plane, and with a circular cross section of the Earth I'd expect less debris/area near the poles.
(I don't know this, I'm just extrapolating from what I actually know.)
> ... with a circular cross section of the Earth I'd expect less debris/area near the poles.
As it turns out, Antarctica is a very productive place to look for meteorites, first because there isn't really a preferred geographical zone for meteorite impacts, and second because of the large, empty ice fields, against which newly fallen meteorites stand out.
One of the most famous meteorite finds of all time, ALH84001, was located by simply driving across the Antarctica landscape and watching for dark objects.
Bingo. In order to report meteorite strikes, there must be 1) people to report them and 2) some institution to track them. If anything, it looks pretty evenly distributed after adjusting for 1 and 2.
Well, not all meteorite strikes could have been reported 4,300+ years ago! This is probably a map of where people have been looking for them. Less developed places, such as in middle America, (which stands out like a sore thumb) might make for good locations to look for such things!
I suspect it would be extremely challenging to observe a meteor from a rain forest, and practically infeasible to find it after. Unless we'll rely on satellite observations
I highly doubt we're able to locate or date meteorites (which are really, really small, especially after they've passed through the atmosphere) with satellites. I suspect we haven't found meteorites in rainforests because we haven't been looking due to the difficulty.
Note the large number of strikes in the Sahara desert (and Antarctica, as someone else noted).
There are at least two things going on here, probably more:
1) Population density 2) Ease of finding the meteorite or crater (this is easier in barren areas with relatively homogeneous terrain, like the desert and Antartica).