What would happen if meteors hit Earth?

You may have seen Ameteors fly into Earth's atmosphere, in the form of shooting stars.

- Lizzie

Meteors are usually less than a few inches across, and the light you see is them burning up as they hit the resistance of the atmosphere. Less often, larger rocks called asteroids will fall toward Earth, but most of them break up and burn before landing, too. (If any pieces hit the ground, those rocks are called meteorites.) For an asteroid to make it all the way to the ground in one piece, it would have to be roughly 100 feet (30 meters) across or larger, says Paul Chodas. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, he monitors the asteroids that get close to Earth. A bit larger still, and the falling space rock would leave a crater. But things don't start g