Importance
The quality to be an "observed fall", makes these meteorites relevant for several reasons.
First of all these meteorites can be used to make statistics about the abundance of the different kinds of meteorites that fall on the Earth without any bias from weathering and from easiness of identification. For example iron meteorites last longer to weathering and are easier to identify as "strange" stones: for this reason the ratio of iron meteorites among (approved, non Antarctic) finds (6.7%) is different from the ratio among observed falls (4.4%).
Falls are also fresher (low weathered, well preserved material) and are therefore more interesting to scientists. Historically they were also the most important proof to understand and accept the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites.
Read more about this topic: Meteorite Fall
Famous quotes containing the word importance:
“One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“More than ten million women march to work every morning side by side with the men. Steadily the importance of women is gaining not only in the routine tasks of industry but in executive responsibility. I include also the woman who stays at home as the guardian of the welfare of the family. She is a partner in the job and wages. Women constitute a part of our industrial achievement.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essential and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)