Record Meteorite Hits Norway

equex256 writes "Early Wednesday morning, a meteorite streaked across the sky in northern Norway, near Finland and Russia. A witness (Article in Norwegian) went up the mountain to where it hit and reported seeing large boulders that had fallen out of the mountainside, along with many broken trees. Norwegian astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten, Norway's largest newspaper, that he would compare the explosive force of the impact with the Hiroshima bomb. This meteorite is suspected to be much larger than the 90-kilo (198-pound) meteorite which hit Alta in 1904, previously recognized as the largest to hit Norway. From the article: 'Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.'"

Comments

Re:Hiroshima?

[Silverlancer]

The curtains were something like 150km away from the meteor impact... I expect Hiroshima would have done similar at that range.

Re:Hiroshima?

[Nutria]

I guess but if I recall correctly hiroshima did a little bit more then just "blow in some curtains".

If Little Boy was detonated in the far northern mountains of Norway, it also would have had similar minimal effect.

Re:Hiroshima?

[NewmanBlur]

I've been to Hiroshima. The atomic bomb killed 140,000 people, if you include those who died of bomb-related injuries and illnesses, within (iirc) a year after the attack. If you increase that to five years, the number increases by many thousands, though I don't recall the exact number.

The bomb levelled literally the entire city -- only one building remained, now referred to as the Genbaku Dome . It's still standing, but it has been re-inforced with a steel structure to retain the shape it was in after the war.

Anyway, the point is that even if this meteor was "substantially bigger" than the 200-pound record holder, I find it extremely hard to believe that it would do even a miniscule fraction of the what the A-bomb did.

Re:Is this real?

[49152]

Yes, it's real. The impact also showed up on seismic recorders http://www.astro.uio.no/ita/nyheter/ildkule06/ildk ule06.html (You can study the images in this Norwegian article from the University of Oslo).

It's how you distribute the energy.

[DigiShaman]

There is a difference in how the energy was distributed. With the A-Bomb, it was an atmospheric blast. With the space rock, the energy was absorbed into the Earths crust.

Re:It's how you distribute the energy.

[Deadstick]

Should be modded up. An airburst sends down a mongo shock wave that flattens structures over a big area (not to mention the radiation that isn't a factor in the case of a meteor impact). A ground impact/explosion "over-destroys" a much smaller area, using its energy to excavate a crater instead of knocking buildings down.

The Tunguska event of 1908 devastated a really big area because it was an airburst: apparently a comet whose ice content flashed into steam when it hit the atmosphere.

rj

Re:Obligatory Meteor Video

[ACDChook]

And for all you language nazis out there, meteorite is a silly word and should be abolished.

I think you'll find that by definition, an object is a meteor while it falls through the atmosphere, and the rock that hits the ground is a meteorite. If it burns up in the atmosphere, then there is no meteorite, just a short-lived meteor.

Re:Obligatory Meteor Video

[morcego]

Actually, you are right:

Metoroid -> Atmosphere -> Meteor -> Ground -> Meteorite

Wish they made it easier to do rev. calcs

[jd]

I reversed the calculation to guess at how big the rock was that created the crater in Antarctica that was recently discovered, which is 300 miles across. I assumed that the asteroid had a fairly low density (porus rock). Assuming the object is travelling "slowly" (11 km/s), it would need to be 60 miles across to create a final crater of the necessary size. Even at 300 miles away (the edge of the crater), wind speeds would hit 8200 mph and the earth tremors would still be 11.3 on the Richter scale. A "typical" asteroid strike would be 17 km/s. To create the necessary crater, you'd be looking at a lump of rock 45 miles across. Most of the effects would be the same, except there would be a gigantic fireball. Again, at the crater's rim, you'd be looking at 8.53 x 10^10 joules/m^2 of energy for about 9110 seconds - enough to vaporize anything remotely close to the impact.

Assuming typical velocity, an iron asteroid would be a mere 22 miles across. The radiation would only be two-thirds that of the porus asteroid at the same speed.

If this was indeed the impact crater that triggered the initial phase of the Great Extinction, then the low density/high energy strike would produce vastly more heat and therefore affect the climate that much more.

Re:Giant Røck

[Man Eating Duck]

I'm Norwegian.

The vowel ø in Norwegian is pronounced like the vowel sound in "sun".

Have føn :)

BTW, the astronomer mentioned (Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard, try it :) is something of an astronomer celebrity here. The press will always go to him when there are spectacular events, like this, or eclipses. He's done a great job to make astronomy accessible and fun to less technically inclined people, both by giving public lectures on fascinating subjects, and by writing a couple of books on "popularized astronomy".

Cheers