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Author Topic:   Shock Wave of Fireball Meteor Rattles Siberia, Injuring 1,200
Lexxigramer
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From: The Etheric Realms...Still out looking for Schrodinger's cat...& LEXIGRAMMING.♥.. is my Passion!
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posted February 17, 2013 03:54 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Lexxigramer     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Shock Wave of Fireball Meteor Rattles Siberia, Injuring 1,200

MOSCOW — Gym class came to a halt inside the Chelyabinsk Railway Institute, and students gathered around the window, gazing at the fat white contrail that arced its way across the morning sky. A missile? A comet? A few quiet moments passed. And then, with incredible force, the windows blew in.

The scenes from Chelyabinsk, rocked by an intense shock wave when a meteor hit the Earth’s atmosphere Friday morning, offer a glimpse of an apocalyptic scenario that many have walked through mentally, and Hollywood has popularized, but scientists say has never before injured so many people.

Students at the institute crammed through a staircase thickly blanketed with glass out to the street, where hundreds stood in awe, looking at the sky. The flash came in blinding white, so bright that the vivid shadows of buildings slid swiftly and sickeningly across the ground. It burst yellow, then orange. And then there was the sound of frightened, confused people.

Around 1,200 people, 200 of them children, were injured, mostly by glass that exploded into schools and workplaces, according to Russia’s Interior Ministry. Others suffered skull trauma and broken bones. No deaths were reported. A city administrator in Chelyabinsk said that more than a million square feet of glass shattered, leaving many buildings exposed to icy cold.

And as scientists tried to piece together the chain of events that led to Friday’s disaster — on the very day a small asteroid passed close to Earth — residents of Chelyabinsk were left to grapple with memories that seemed to belong in science fiction.

“I opened the window from surprise — there was such heat coming in, as if it were summer in the yard, and then I watched as the flash flew by and turned into a dot somewhere over the forest,” wrote Darya Frenn, a blogger. “And in several seconds there was an explosion of such force that the window flew in along with its frame, the monitor fell, and everything that was on the desk.”

“God forbid you should ever have to experience anything like this,” she wrote.

At 9 a.m., the sun had just risen on the Ural Mountains, which form a ridge between European Russia and the vast stretch of Siberia to the east. The area around Chelyabinsk is a constellation of defense industry manufacturing cities, including some devoted to developing and producing nuclear weapons. The factory towns are separated by great expanses of uninhabited forest.

As residents of Chelyabinsk began their day on Friday, a 10-ton meteor around 10 feet in diameter was hurtling toward the Earth at a speed of about 10 to 12 miles per second, experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences reported in a statement released Friday. Scientists believe the meteor exploded upon hitting the lower atmosphere and disintegrated at an altitude of about 20 to 30 miles above the Earth’s surface — not an especially unusual event, the statement said.

This meteor was unusual because its material was so hard — it may have been made of iron, the statement said — which allowed some small fragments, or meteorites, perhaps 5 percent of the meteor’s mass, to reach the Earth’s surface. Nothing similar has been recorded in Russian territory since 2002, the statement said.

Estimates of the meteor’s size varied considerably. Peter G. Brown, a physics professor and director of the Center for Planetary Science and Exploration at the University of Western Ontario, said it was closer to 50 feet in diameter and probably weighed around 7,000 tons. He said the energy released by the explosion was equivalent to 300 kilotons of TNT, making it the largest recorded since the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia, which is believed to have been caused by an asteroid.

Meteors typically cause sonic booms when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, and the one that occurred over Chelyabinsk was forceful enough to shatter dishes and televisions in people’s homes. Car alarms were triggered for miles around, and the roof of a zinc factory partially collapsed. Video clips, uploaded by the hundreds starting early Friday morning, showed ordinary mornings interrupted by a blinding flash and the sound of shattering glass.

Maria Polyakova, 25, head of reception at the Park-City Hotel in Chelyabinsk, said it was the light that caught her eye.

“I saw a flash in the window, turned toward it and saw a burning cloud, which was surrounded by smoke and was going downward — it reminded me of what you see after an explosion,” she said. The blast that followed was forceful enough to shatter the heavy automatic glass doors on the hotel’s first floor, as well as many windows on the floor above, she said.

Valentina Nikolayeva, a teacher in Chelyabinsk, described it as “an unreal light” that filled all the classrooms on one side of School No. 15.

“It was a light which never happens in life; it happens probably only in the end of the world,” she said in a clip posted on a news portal, LifeNews.ru. She said she saw a vapor trail, like one that appears after an airplane, only dozens of times bigger. “The light was coming from there. Then the light went out, and the trail began to change. The changes were taking place within it, like in the clouds, because of the wind. It began to shrink and then, a minute later, an explosion.”

“A shock wave,” she said. “It was not clear what it was, but we were deafened at that moment. The window glass flew.”

The strange light had drawn many to the windows, the single most dangerous place to be. Tyoma Chebalkin, a student at Southern Urals State University, said that the shock wave traveled from the western side the city, and that anyone standing close to windows — security guards at their posts, for instance — was caught in a hail of broken glass.

He spoke to Vozhd.info, an online news portal, four hours after the explosion, when cellphones, which had been knocked out, were still out of order. He said that traffic was at a standstill in the city center, and that everyone he could see was trying to place calls. He said he saw no signs of panic.

In those strange hours, Ms. Frenn, the blogger, wrote down the thoughts that had raced through her mind — radiation, a plane crash, the beginning of a war — and noted that her extremities went numb while she was waiting to hear that the members of her family were unhurt.

When emergency officials announced that what had occurred was a meteor, what occurred to her was: It could happen again.

“I am at home, whole and alive,” she wrote. “I have gathered together my documents and clothes. And a carrier for the cats. Just in case.”

Reporting was contributed by Viktor Klimenko and Andrew Roth from Moscow, Alan Cowell from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 15, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the name of the university at which Peter Brown is the director of the Center for Planetary Science and Exploration. It is Canada’s University of Western Ontario, not Western University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/world/europe/meteorite-fragments-are-said-to-rain-down-on-siberia.html?_r=0

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ShyVirgo1979
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posted February 17, 2013 04:30 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for ShyVirgo1979     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
WOW...ru kidding me? Usually scientists foresee this stuff ahead of time. The article makes it seem like they were all 'uh what's that in the sky?'. Thank u lexx. I found this interesting.

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Lei_Kuei
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posted February 17, 2013 07:41 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Lei_Kuei     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Copying this from the Avalon forums:

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http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?55922-Meteor-Crash-This-Time-In-CUBA

I wanted to share these finds from "Earthchangers College" that may be pertinent. Here is a scan of a December 1983 Washington Post article that is very interesting. Take care and enjoy the day! Maggie

quote:
This is a post on that forum from John Dinardo

Quote It's really just basic physics. Visualize iron filings evenly sprinkled on a tabletop. Then visualize a strong magnet slowly sliding across the tabletop. The magnet attracts the iron filings in its pathway, leaving a clear swath in the midst of the field of iron filings.

In the late 1990s, Dr. John Murray of the Open University in Britain, and Dr. John Matese of the University of Louisiana, unknown to one another, discovered that there are "non-random" bare zones or sparse zones in the comet-filled Oort Cloud, a spherically shaped blizzard of comets, way beyond, and surrounding, our Solar System. Normally, this comet-filled Oort Cloud looks like a dense swarm of gnats flying around your head at sundown on a summer evening.

When Murray and Matese observed these "non-random" comet field patterns in the Oort Cloud, they logically and correctly concluded that some massive object is acting like that strong magnet on your tabletop, gravitationally clearing a pathway through the Oort Cloud's cometary blizzard, like a plow truck clears a snow filled highway.

This massive gravitational magnet, a NASA-discovered incoming dwarf star, holds captive thousands of comets, asteroids, meteors, boulders, rocks, and red iron-oxide dust in its intense gravitational grip. Therefore, we must face facts, and accept what NASA and its supervisory parent, the National Security Agency, have barred from media reportage for the past three decades, ever since The Washington Post heralded, on its front page, the discovery of this incoming dwarf star, which the past decade's records prove is the cause of all of these extremely severe meteorological and geological events. Currently, the denser inner region of this celestial flying beehive's surrounding swarm of space objects is approaching the environs of our inner Solar System, on its way toward its inexorable gravitational rendezvous with our Sun, in what newtonian physics principles indicate will be its looping trajectory around the Sun.

Why would a dwarf star be heading through our inner Solar System, toward the Sun? Simply explained, gravity works! You see, the mass of this incoming brown dwarf star is a thousand or more Earth-masses. Yet, the mass of our Sun is one-third of a million Earth-masses! So, our Sun is like that powerful magnet on the tabletop, with this incoming dwarf star being like a steel ball bearing rolling, by magnetic attraction, toward the magnet. http://earthchanges.ning.com/profile...age=1#comments

Astrophysicist Jim McCanney http://www.jmccanneyscience.com/
reports: Meteorite Threats Increasing (not sure of the date?)


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So the theory goes that there is a dwarf star or planetary body moving through our solar systems carrying alot of debris in its wake, and if such is true expect lots more Meteorites it seems!

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~*~ Did you know that a circle is round? ~*~ - Tautology
You can't handle my level of Tinfoil! ~ {;,;}

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Lexxigramer
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Posts: 1518
From: The Etheric Realms...Still out looking for Schrodinger's cat...& LEXIGRAMMING.♥.. is my Passion!
Registered: Feb 2012

posted February 17, 2013 10:11 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Lexxigramer     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by ShyVirgo1979:
WOW...ru kidding me? Usually scientists foresee this stuff ahead of time. The article makes it seem like they were all 'uh what's that in the sky?'. Thank u lexx. I found this interesting.
You're welcome ShyVirgo1979.
Meteors fall to Earth all the time.
Most go unnoticed or burn up before hitting the Earth.
Here is another one that was noticed:
quote:
The Tagish Lake meteorite fell at 16:43Z on 18 January 2000 in the Tagish Lake area in northwestern British Columbia, Canada.
Fragments of the Tagish Lake[1] meteorite landed upon the Earth on January 18, 2000 at 16:43 UT (08:43 local time in Yukon) after a large meteoroid exploded in the upper atmosphere at altitudes of 50–30 kilometres (31–19 mi) with an estimated total energy release of about 1.7 kilotons. Following the reported sighting of a fireball in southern Yukon and northern British Columbia, Canada, more than 500 fragments of the meteorite were collected from the lake's frozen surface. Post-event atmospheric photographs of the trail left by the associated fireball and U.S. Department of Defense satellite information yielded the meteor trajectory.
Most of the stony, carbonaceous fragments landed on the Taku Arm of the lake, coming to rest on the lake's frozen surface. The passage of the fireball and the high-altitude explosion set off a wide array of satellite sensors as well as seismographs.
The Tagish Lake meteoroid is estimated to have been 4 meters in diameter and 56 tonnes in weight before it entered the Earth's atmosphere. However, it is estimated that only 1.3 tonnes remained after ablation in the upper atmosphere and several fragmentation events, meaning that around 97% of the meteorite had vaporised, mainly becoming stratospheric dust that was seen as noctilucent clouds to the northwest of Edmonton at sunset, some 12 hours after the event. Of the 1.3 tonnes of fragmented rock, somewhat over 10 kilograms (22 lb) (about 1%) was found and collected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagish_Lake_%28meteorite%29

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