Tiny meteorites are everywhere. Here's how to find them [video]

[rm999]

Cool video, but what a disappointingly inaccurate title.

Spoiler alert: they spent days finding metallic dust, cleaning the dust, and sifting through the samples with a microscope. They shipped ~15-20 interesting samples to Europe where an expert with an electron microscope analyzed each sample. The expert presumably spent a lot of time analyzing each sample on his expensive equipment and found zero meteorites.

The title insinuates it's easy to find meteorites with no specialized equipment, but everything about the video contradicts this.

[fouc]

I don't think the video mentioned anything about an electron microscope.

Jon Larsen is basically an amateur scientist that figured out what micrometeorites would look like by a process of elimination. Clearly a regular microscope is sufficient for this.

The nice images from Jan Kihle are due to a camera/microscope system that takes a snap shot at different focuses to make a composite picture. It wouldn't be an electron microscope.

This is clearly within the range of amateurs if you have a microscope & the book and just get good at eliminating unlikely samples.

[andremendes]

I agree the title can mislead someone to think it's easy but after watching the video I think it's fair to say the title is accurate. Micro meteorites are in fact everywhere and they indeed describe a way to find them. The fact they didn't succeed in finding one is shadowed by the quality of the overall content.

[ishi]

I distinctly remember having a book about nature-related experiments back in the 1980s, which talked about using a magnet to collect metallic dust particles, some of which could be micro-meteorites. I think it was a translation of "Simple nature projects" by Hans Jürgen Press. Perhaps Jon Larsen had the same book...

[patrickyeon]

That was really enjoyable, and I expect my inspection/soldering microscope would be up to this task if I had a roof to search and a few days to spare.

Here's the book shown if anybody else is looking for it: https://www.amazon.com/Search-Stardust-Micrometeorites-Terre...

[SubiculumCode]

I really enjoyed this video (and the null result is honest). Welcomes good amateur science video!

[newman8r]

I wonder if you could use convolutional neural networks and a microscope mounted on some sort of x-y platform to hunt these down. just collect some dust, spread it evenly on the platform and process it.

[spiderPig]

Good to see The Verge investing in these types of articles instead of the usual tech drama

[themodelplumber]

This journalist's voice sounds exactly like Tucker Gott, who runs a pretty interesting channel on paramotoring.

https://youtu.be/e4bovIUYvrY

[porphyrogene]

I wonder how much extraterrestrial material is added to the Earth every year and how that affects the geological cycle. They said that the "glass foam" on the samples is unexplained, could it have been formed by their interaction with particles in the atmosphere while in their molten state after entry?

[itronitron]

40,000 tons is added annually, not sure where they got the number from but there is an summary here >> https://gizmodo.com/did-you-know-that-earth-is-getting-light...

[Para2016]

None of their samples contained micrometeorites, that must have been really frustrating.

He said they lost a cool looking one during transfer with a wet toothpick, they could try using micropipettes like some biology labs use.

[lightedman]

If you don't live in a dusty area like a desert, put a bowl of water on your roof for 24 hours. Come back and take a magnet to it, and put that under a microscope. Easiest method to collect micrometeorites.

[istjohn]

According to the video, each square meter of Earth will get one micrometeorite a year. So that bowl is just going to have terrestial dust after one day.