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"Huh? The speed of sound is only ~720mph at sea level (would travel about 85 miles in 7 minutes)."

Then how could a metorite which SLOWED to 720 mph to make a sonic boom and burn up to a point where they can't even say if any of it made it to the ground do any damage like a nuclear bomb at Hiroshima? Shouldn't northern Norway be devasted? Miles of trees blasted into toothpicks and villages vaporized?

"Then how could a metorite which SLOWED to 720 mph to make a sonic boom..."

Who said it slowed to 720mph? It apparently hit a mountain side (very likely going a lot faster than 720mph), and the resulting *boom* is what was heard and felt for quite some distance.

And the Hiroshima bomb comparison was just speculation on the part of the astronomer.

See my 66 and 62. We get pounded frequently with rocks and chunks of ice (mixed with dust). Some are big enough to go BOOM when they hit, and most of these explosions are way way up in the air- all we get down here is the boom and a flash. Use Clusty to look up bolide and meteorite and similar topics.

Nobody is saying these bolides cause any damage- they are comparing the energy released (kinetic energy transferred from the incoming bolide to the atmosphere) to something us humans are in awe of, nukes. If they said "the energy transferred was almost two million joules" few would understand and nobody would be impressed. But comparing it to one of the smallest atomic explosions makes a reference point people can grasp. If one of these bolides reached a city and then broke up you'd see damage, like in Tunguska where trees were flattened for miles, all pointing out from the blast center.

In an earlier post I said that we actually exploded nukes in space- Starfish Prime went off in near space someplace north of the Johnson Islands. It went off with the force of FIVE Hiroshima bombs, yet neither the Johnsons nor Hawaii took any damage. It's just that, that's how much energy was released. Look up Starfish Prime.