ANTARCTICA — An artificial intelligence program has used satellite data to project that more than 300,000 meteorites may lie undiscovered on the surface of Antarctica, according to a new study in the Science Advances journal.


When meteorites fall on Antarctica, snow accumulates on top of them before compacting and becoming ice. The ice sheets flow toward the ocean, dragging the meteorites with them, but if conditions are right the meteorites can become trapped near the surface of bare, blue ice, which makes them easy to recover.


Having successfully identified almost 83 percent of known meteorite-rich Antarctic zones, the new AI program projected more than 600 potentially meteorite-rich zones, with many unexplored, and the study’s lead author told Space.com that new recovery techniques, such as the use of drones, could combine with the projections to create a “new era of Antarctic meteorite recovery missions.”