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Record Meteorite Hits Norway

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the duck dept.

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.'"

11 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Giant Røck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do meteørites sound different with a slash through the middle?

  2. Obligatory Meteor Video by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah its probably fake, but cool nonetheless:
    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4653448813 733199771&q=meteor

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

    1. Re:Obligatory Meteor Video by ACDChook · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

    2. Re:Obligatory Meteor Video by morcego · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, you are right:

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

      --
      morcego
  3. Hiroshima? by Durrok · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I guess but if I recall correctly hiroshima did a little bit more then just "blow in some curtains". Even if accurate this is a pretty bad metaphor, the Hiroshima bomb brings on ideas of destruction and chaos. Even if you took the radiation aspect away from the Hiroshima bomb it still would have done far more damage. Guess the whole line of "location, location, location" really is true.

    --
    I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
    1. Re:Hiroshima? by iamlucky13 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Of course the meteor would not have had any noteworthy radioactivity and was not in a populated area. I don't remember exactly how often it's estimated to happen and I can't find any sources, but meteors of this size hit the earth a lot more often than most people realize...something like between once a year and once a decade. The comparison to Hiroshima really is about the energy of the impact, not the destructiveness. Little boy had a yield equivalent to approximately 15,000 tons of TNT.

  4. Meanwhile in Cupertino... by daeley · · Score: 5, Funny

    Steve Jobs's giant wallscreen sparkles to life. A visibly pale and shaken Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg appears with a panicked situation room full of Norwegian officials behind him.

    "Ah, Prime Minister, good," Jobs says with a trademarked smile. "I see you got our little message. Let's finish our chat about DRM regulations...."

    (reference)

    --
    I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
  5. Oblig. Impact Calculator by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Whenever the topic of meteors comes up, someone has to post a link to the University of Arizona impact effects calculator. Play with the numbers, see if you can destroy the earth.

    Also worth checking out along the Lucifer's hammer line of thought is How to Destroy the Earth

    I tried a quick reverse engineering of the meteor with the calculator. An iron meteor 4.5 meters in diameter moving 20 km/s hitting crystalline rock at 45 degrees will have a yield of 18 kilotons...slightly higher than the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima. The average interval of an impact of this size on earth is about once every 5 years. Most go largely unnoticed. The earth is a big place.

  6. Re:Is this real? by 49152 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  7. It's how you distribute the energy. by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  8. Re:Hmmm... by LaminatorX · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, I saw a paper presented back in the late 90's that fairly convincingly made the case for a mostly iron meteor. The author's contention was that the object slowed due to air resistance, it would heat up. As is heated, the metal would have softenned. As it softenned, the metal would start to pancake like a dum-dum bullet. As it pancakes, its air resistance increases, causing it to slow down even more and heat up even faster, causing it to pancake even more... until you get an airbirst at an altitude with on the order of magnitude suggested by the tree angles at Tunguska. If you acept his hypothesis about the meteor's composition, there were no major contradictions in the evidence.