Record Meteorite Hits Norway 281
equex256 writes "Early Wednesday morning, a meteorite streaked across the sky in northern Norway, near Finland and Russia. A witness (Article in Norwegian) went up the mountain to where it hit and reported seeing large boulders that had fallen out of the mountainside, along with many broken trees. Norwegian astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten, Norway's largest newspaper, that he would compare the explosive force of the impact with the Hiroshima bomb. This meteorite is suspected to be much larger than the 90-kilo (198-pound) meteorite which hit Alta in 1904, previously recognized as the largest to hit Norway. From the article: 'Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.'"
Re:Obligatory Meteor Video (Score:3, Informative)
Whoever uploaded that video just cut out the last few seconds where it flashes the manufacturers name.
Re:Hiroshima? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hiroshima? (Score:5, Informative)
If Little Boy was detonated in the far northern mountains of Norway, it also would have had similar minimal effect.
Re:Hiroshima? (Score:4, Informative)
The bomb levelled literally the entire city -- only one building remained, now referred to as the Genbaku Dome [worldheritagesite.org]. It's still standing, but it has been re-inforced with a steel structure to retain the shape it was in after the war.
Anyway, the point is that even if this meteor was "substantially bigger" than the 200-pound record holder, I find it extremely hard to believe that it would do even a miniscule fraction of the what the A-bomb did.
Re:Is this real? (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obligatory Meteor Video (Score:5, Informative)
I think you'll find that by definition, an object is a meteor while it falls through the atmosphere, and the rock that hits the ground is a meteorite. If it burns up in the atmosphere, then there is no meteorite, just a short-lived meteor.
Re:It's how you distribute the energy. (Score:5, Informative)
The Tunguska event of 1908 devastated a really big area because it was an airburst: apparently a comet whose ice content flashed into steam when it hit the atmosphere.
rj
Re:Obligatory Meteor Video (Score:5, Informative)
Metoroid -> Atmosphere -> Meteor -> Ground -> Meteorite
Quote : "Enorm fart." (Score:3, Informative)
From that article, this one line jumped out at me: "Enorm fart."
Now granted, I don't speak the native tongue up there in Norway, but I think we all can translate that.
Also found this sesmic data on the web: http://www.norsar.no/NDC/bulletins/gbf/2006/GBF06
NORTH OF SVALBARD
Origin time Lat Lon Azres Timres Wres Nphase Ntot Nsta Netmag
2006-157:02.13.21.0 83.81 2.84 5.25 0.18 1.49 2 2 1 0.04
Sta Dist Az Ph Time Tres Azim Ares Vel Snr Amp Freq Fkq Pol Arid Mag
SPI 668.3 346.0 Pn 02.14.50.4 0.2 349.0 3.0 10.1 5.2 50.5 4.93 1 345124
SPI 668.3 346.0 Sn 02.15.55.8 0.2 338.5 -7.5 5.8 4.1 34.0 8.43 3 2 345125 0.04
Re:Who is tracking these things? (Score:2, Informative)
There are some effots being made such as http://neat.jpl.nasa.gov/> but they get next to no funding.
How many people are you going to be able to convince when all you can say is that "It's likely one will hit a populated area sometime in the future".The general reaction that I've witnessed is "If it was going to happen, why hasn't it yet?" and "That's just science fiction".
It's far to abstract a threat for the vast majority of people to care about. . .
Re:Hiroshima? (Score:4, Informative)
In 1980, Mt. St. Helens caused the largest landslide in history... then proceeded to level everything within many miles. Trees brushed over like toothpicks... valleys buried to hundreds of feet in ejecta and ash... it blew the entire north slope of the mountain away.
It had the force of 27,000 atomic bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima (source [wikipedia.org]). It managed to kill all of 57 people.
Please note that energy != destruction. If this meteorite crashed into Hiroshima, depending on the circumstances, the energy released on impact could have the potential to level the entire city and kill over 100,000 people.
And if Mt. St. helens was located in the right spot in Japan, it could have taken out FAR more than this (think millions).
Wish they made it easier to do rev. calcs (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming typical velocity, an iron asteroid would be a mere 22 miles across. The radiation would only be two-thirds that of the porus asteroid at the same speed.
If this was indeed the impact crater that triggered the initial phase of the Great Extinction, then the low density/high energy strike would produce vastly more heat and therefore affect the climate that much more.
The lexicological effects of falling down a gravit (Score:3, Informative)
Saying a meteorite streaked across the sky is like saying ham likes to wallow in the mud.
Re:Hiroshima? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Giant Røck (Score:5, Informative)
The vowel ø in Norwegian is pronounced like the vowel sound in "sun".
Have føn
BTW, the astronomer mentioned (Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard, try it
Cheers
Re:It's how you distribute the energy. (Score:3, Informative)
Take the Meteor Crater [wikipedia.org] in Arizona for example. Throughout its history (after being discovered and acknowledged to be a impact from a space object) people thought they could find a rather large iron core. There were many owners of the site who set up drilling/mining projects so they could find the "grand prize" of this object.
However, all this time they could never find this no matter how deep they went, but all over the site was plenty of iron and other minerals like coesite and stishovite (and the special quartz you can only make when you have high energy impacts like an abomb).
So it is pretty much speculated that the object had an airburst right before it impacted turning into plasma. The crater was created through raw energy of this explosion rather than the object burrying itself into the earth.