A Brief History
On February 15, 2013, Russians were stunned by a meteor exploding 76,000 feet above Chelyabinsk Oblast!
Digging Deeper
Digging deeper, we find the largest object to enter Earth’s atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event, coincidentally also in Russia.
The 2013 event literally came out of the blue and with no warning, streaming across south central Russia from the southeast at a speed of Mach 60 (that is over 40,000 miles per hour)! Giving off brilliant lights that were brighter the light from the sun, the fiery trajectory was captured on many personal recording devices, including dash cams mounted on private automobiles. (Russians apparently feel the need for video proof of who exactly caused a traffic accident, hence the proliferation of dash cams!)
The meteor, later known as the “Chelyabinsk Meteor,” weighed in the area of 13,000 tons as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere (that is the equivalent of about 200 M-1 Abrams tanks). The enormous explosion over Chelyabinsk is estimated to have been approximately 500 kilotons equivalent of TNT, or, for better perspective, around 30 times the power of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, although perhaps a fifth of that energy was produced as light.
Owing to the relatively high altitude of the explosion, blast damage to the surface of the Earth, though widespread, was not catastrophic. Thousands of windows were blown in and over 7,000 buildings were damaged. At least 1,500 people are known to have sought medical attention for injuries, and undoubtedly many more minor injuries were not reported.
This big bang of a surprise took place while astronomers were tracking an asteroid of about 100 feet across expected to pass close by the Earth, startling those scientists! The 60-foot Chelyabinsk meteor went unnoticed, which is somewhat unnerving to say the least. Astronomers later determined that the two objects were unrelated.
The largest chunk of the Chelyabinsk Meteor that was recovered was found in a lake where it had made a 20-foot hole in the ice. Weighing 1,400 pounds, it is fortunate that it did not land on an inhabited building! How bad could it have been if the entire meteor had impacted the surface of the earth? Ask the dinosaurs!
A final bizarre fact about this event is that at the Sochi Winter Olympics, seven of the gold medals awarded had pieces of the Chelyabinsk Meteor embedded in them!
Question for students (and subscribers): Have you ever seen a meteor? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
To own your own piece of the meteor…
Dudorov, Alexander, Nick Gorkavyi, et al. Chelyabinsk Superbolide (Springer Praxis Books). Springer, 2019.
