Posted on 06/09/2003 5:25:21 PM PDT by Mike Darancette
IF IT had hit Central London, Britain would no longer have a capital city. The force of the meteorite that hit eastern Siberia last September destroyed 40 square miles of forest and caused earth tremors felt 60 miles away.
An expedition from Russia's Kosmopoisk institute has only recently reached the site in a remote area north of Lake Baikal because of bad weather and difficult terrain, the Interfax news agency said yesterday.
Fragments of the meteorite had apparently exploded into shrapnel 18 miles above the Earth with the force of at least 200 tonnes of TNT.
At the time, Russian media reported that villagers 60 miles away had witnessed a gigantic fireball screeching down from the sky, causing windows to rattle and house lights to swing as they were hit by blast waves on September 25. There were no reported casualties.
Copyright 2003, The Times
Is there a meteorite magnet in the area, or what?
These events (maybe not to this scale) happen way more often than was earlier believed. There was a similar event over Northern Canada in 2000.
Most such events (70%) would happen over the oceans and Siberia and Northern Canada are a good chunk of real estate.
It would take a megaton range nukebomb to flatten a township, and of course there are degrees of lesser damage farther out. Townships are 6 by 6 miles. This meteor was apparently 5000 times smaller than a megaton. Or one five-thousandth as big depending on your politics. Neither Nagasaki nor Hiroshima were totally destroyed by the nukebombs, although devastation was essentially complete inside a certain radius.
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Did i miss something? Land has been discovered at the North Pole? Who da thunk it!
The numbers here just do not add up. 40 sq miles of destruction, 200 tons of TNT? Hmmm, the Hiroshima bomb was about 15,000 tons of TNT and detonated at an optimal altitude and did not cause 40 sq miles of total destruction. Maybe a few sq miles.
I wish reporters were smart enough to know what they are reporting on. The state of journalism is really sad, clueless people writing articles full of obvious mis statements of fact. Oh well, public schools I guess.
Only with in a very large margin of error, if none of the impactor survived impact. Different kinds of impactors have different kinds of bangs.
airbust, very little if any water displacement.
No, it's just damn big.
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