Posted on 01/17/2018 6:05:39 AM PST by shove_it
Residents of southeast Michigan were left a bit shaken Tuesday night after a big bright flash lit up the sky and the ground beneath them shook.
A flying saucer? No. A shooting star? Not quite.
The National Weather Service eventually solved the mystery, tweeting "USGS confirms meteor occurred around 810 pm, causing a magnitude 2.0 earthquake."
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
Multiple sonic booms and aerial explosions violently move the air. Think about when thunder rattles your house. The sound waves moving the air caused seismic equipment to register the vibrations on the earth.
We have been having those in the Midwest too. My wife and I were woke up by, what seemed to be a boom in the back yard. I got up to investigate and just as I laid back down I heard it again. It sounded like somebody dropping something heavy on my deck. But the dog didn't seem to take notice. Still I took her and my .45 down stairs to check things out. The next morning, it was on the news. I have never heard of that before this season.
I would have said the same thing. But...we were likely both thinking of Grand Haven. It turns out that New Haven is just NW of Fair Haven, both on the north side of Lake Sinclair.
Exactly. Thanks for that explanation. It is not despite what the article said, an “earthquake” but rather a sonic boom that causes a violent air wave that causes shaking at ground level.
like a rumbling sound and felt a bit of a shake sort of like a big heavy truck had gone right past my house. I felt another rumble a few minutes later.
It was around that time (considering the hour difference CST) when I experienced the same thing living here in central Friendship Adams cty Wisconsin. Intend to check with neighbors to see if they experienced the same thing
Yup. Down here on the Space Coast of Florida where I live, in the glide path of Space Shuttle landings in bygone years, we got jolted out our seats. It really gets your attention.
Missed it’s target. Detroit is just a little bit to the south.
I have never heard of them before either until there was an article just last week about reports of them in my local newspaper.
From what I understand they are very localized events, not felt very far from where it happens. FWIW where I live I am surrounded by large farm fields; I don’t know if that makes a difference or not but would make sense.
I’ve felt a few small quakes both when I lived in Maryland and a couple since moving to PA.
The one in Maryland back in the early 80’s woke me up, it felt like someone had grabbed the footboard of my bed and had shaken it rather vigorously. I woke up but passed it off as a dream until I heard the reports on the local news the next morning.
Another time since moving to PA I was on the phone with my niece and heard a low and slow booming noise and felt the floor of my apartment shake, sort of rise up and down and back and forth a bit, but for much less than a minute but long enough to notice and know it wasn’t a truck, and my niece some 20 miles away felt it too as we both stopped talking and said to one another – “did you hear and feel that?”
During the 2011 earthquake centered in VA, working in Lancaster County PA, I didn’t feel it but most of my co-workers did. I might have thought it was just the rumbling of one of the many freight trains passing on the tracks behind our building. But it was sort of disturbing when EBS came on shortly after the shake.
This is why we have to keep track of near-Earth objects (NEO’s) very closely. A relatively small meteor (maybe 10-15 feet in diameter) that survives entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and then explodes maybe a mile off the ground could explode with the force of a 150 to 200 KT nuclear warhead—an explosive force powerful enough to flatten a city underneath it.
Immediate aftermath of Chelyabinsk meteor fragmentation at high altitude, with a delay due to shock-wave propagation to ground level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq02C_3FvFo
I am in the downriver area. Southern suburbs of Detroit. Bright flash, and rattled the windows. First thought was thundersnow, but no storms in the area.
Where do you think the Carolina Bays came from?
Right place, wrong time.
Mercifully...
I’ve seen a meteor break-up in the sky.
Heat up and expand the outside over a a cryogenically cold core, it expands, delaminates, and cracks, supersonic stresses and air being rammed into the cracks spalls off the surface and shatters the core.
WAY KEWL to see!
Perhaps, but more likely the sonic boom shoved down a wide enough area to do it.
Based on flash to bang delay one FReeper reported rattled windows 25 miles away.
That's a LOT of air shoved out of the way! That force had to go somewhere...
Me neither, but we didn't get to define the word, or coin a new one for this phenomena.
“My God, Bones, what have I done?”
The flash of light and boom was reported here on FR almost immediately.
You're thinking of Grand Haven
2.0 Earthquake - That about the equivalent of Rosie O’Donuts doing jazzercize.
A meteor can fragment, of course.
But the pieces follow the same trajectory and flare as they continue through the atmosphere.
This thing looked like it heated up, then exploded, with pieces falling straight down. The pieces light up for a very short time.
The lack of a continuing trajectory makes me suspect something else.
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