Searching for Meteorites in Antarctica.

Where is the best place on Earth to find meteorites ? Although meteors fall all over the world, they usually just sink to the bottom of an ocean , are buried by shifting terrain, or are easily confused with terrestrial rocks . At the bottom of the Earth, however, in East Antarctica , huge sheets of blue ice remain pure and barren. When traversing such a sheet , a dark rock will stick out . These rocks have a high probability of being true meteorites -- likely pieces of another world. An explosion or impact might have catapulted these meteorites from the Moon , Mars , or even an asteroid , yielding valuable information about these distant worlds and our early Solar System . Small teams of snowmobiling explorers so far have found thousands. Pictured above, ice-trekkers search a field 25-kilometers in front of Otway Massif in the Transantarctic Mountain Range during the Antarctic summer of 1995-1996. The week marks the 100th anniversary of humans first reaching the Earth's South Pole.

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