Polar Meteors

Incandescent streaks in the night sky which scientists call meteors are caused by atmospheric friction against bits of matter, some as small as peas, falling from outer space. It has been night for two and a half months at Little America, base camp of the second Byrd Antarctic Expedition, and sometimes the air is extraordinarily clear. At such favorable times Dr. Thomas Charles Poulter, on leave from Iowa Wesleyan College, has had a crew of men recording meteors. Four men sit hour after hour inside a glass dome mounted in the roof of a shack. When one spies a falling star he barks "Time!" and a recorder with a stopwatch makes an entry of the hour, minute and second. So steadily and frequently were meteors recorded that Dr. Poulter last week estimated some 1,000,000,000 must fall into the whole of Earth's atmosphere every 24 hours. Previous astronomical estimates put the probable number at about 20,000,000. Of these at least one a day is big enough to resist disintegration and reach Earth as a meteorite.*

*In the last 125 years some 130,000 meteorites have been found, representing 470 falls.

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