Fall Phenomena Icon of a magic wand used to represent editing or enhancement tools.

Meteorite falls can produce light phenomena (meteors, fireballs), sonic booms, and electrophonic sounds. Doppler radar can identify falls by their positions and velocity vectors. Incoming meteoroids lose mass during atmospheric passage; after slowing, the remaining pieces develop a fusion crust, typically a 1–2-mm thick melt-coating that solidifies in the air. Most meteoroids also develop regmaglypts during descent due to localized vortices of hot, turbulent gas sculpting the meteoroid’s surface. Some specimens maintain a fixed orientation during atmospheric passage and develop nose-cone shapes. The disruption of a meteoroid in the atmosphere can shatter it into thousands of fragments; when these individuals hit the ground, they form an elliptical pattern (strewn field) in which the largest fragments tend to occur at the terminus of the field along the line of the meteoroid’s trajectory. There are fossil ordinary chondrites recovered from Ordovician sedimentary rocks. Terrestrial impact craters associated with ordinary-chondrite remnants include Carancas (Peru) and Morokweng (South Africa). Meteorites have been concentrated on Earth in cold deserts (e.g., Antarctica) and hot deserts (e.g., the Sahara).