Missed It By That Much

USAToday, Meteor explodes over Boston as sonic boom rings out across Massachusetts 

A fiery object disintegrated as it fell off the coast of Boston, causing a series of sonic booms that could be heard in numerous towns and cities across the state.

Eric Fisher, chief meteorologist with CBS News' Boston affiliate WBZ-TV, reported that a meteor fell off the coast of Boston around 2 p.m. EDT May 30. According to a report filed with the American Meteor Society, Fisher's description indicated that the phenomenon was “definitely not lighting.”

“It looks the object disintegrated off the southern coast of Massachusetts,” the AMS report adds. “The sounds were heard in numerous cities/towns across eastern MA.”

Nearly 50 witness reports were filed to AMS with sightings of the meteor across eight states and Canada.

The Monday Morning Stimulus

Newsweek, Woman Hit by a Meteorite While Having a Coffee With a Friend. You're chances of being hit by a meteorite are low, but never zero.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Communication Failure up at The Other McCain on time and under budget.

A Heavenly Wakeup Call

A meteorite landed inches away from a woman's pillow as she slept

Ruth Hamilton was woken up by a cosmic crash on October 3, when a meteorite blazed through her roof and landed on her pillow inches away from her face, according to CBC News.

The woman, who lives in Golden, British Columbia, Hamilton told CBC she was woken up by her dog barking.

"The next thing was just a huge explosion and debris all over my face," Hamilton told CBC. "I jumped out of bed and turned on the lights. I didn't know what else to do, so I called 911."

Hamilton said that in a dazed, she "rolled back one of the two pillows I'd been sleeping on and in between them was the meteorite." Other photos in CBC's report show Hamilton's roof with a hole pierced through it.
. . .
According to the report, Hamilton kept mum at first after the incident. She told CBC that she plans to keep the galactic gift after the researchers are done analyzing it, if possible.

I hope she charges them a goodly fee for looking at her space rock. 

Did a Meteorite Strike Destroy Sodom and Gomorrah?

Lot Fleeing Sodom - Benjamin West

According to Newsweek, Biblical City of Sodom Was Blasted to Smithereens by a Massive Asteroid Explosion

An asteroid that burst in a searing aerial explosion may have destroyed the Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam 3,700 years ago, archaeologists reported Saturday.

The city, which lies in the Middle Ghor region of the Jordan Valley, is considered a plausible site for the biblical city of Sodom by some researchers. But this conclusion is hotly debated within the field.

The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by God for their sinful behavior, according to the Christian Bible.

 And so far, he hasn't messed with San Francisco.

Scientists presented their preliminary findings at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Denver, Colorado.

Excavations and radiocarbon dating at Tall el-Hammam suggested most of its mud-brick walls vanished about 3,700 years ago. It’s thought that several Middle Ghor sites were inhabited for 2,500 years or more before the proposed impact.

 That's pretty old!

Minerals that suddenly crystallized in blistering heat support the concept, archaeologist Phillip Silvia, of Christian institution Trinity Southwest University in Albuquerque, told the conference. Silvia and his colleagues have been excavating the city for more than a decade, Science Newsstated.

The enormous blast “not only [wiped] out 100% of the Middle Bronze Age cities and towns, but also [stripped] agricultural soils from once-fertile fields,” researchers wrote in an abstract. Shockwaves may have pushed super hot briney water from the Dead Sea over the east of the Middle Ghor, they added.

And the brine could account for Lot's wife. Well, other than not really knowing where Sodom and Gomorrah were located, and whether or not a meteorite or asteroid really exploded overhead there, it sounds plausible.

Did a Greenland Meteorite Strike Cause the Younger Dryas?

Impact crater 19 miles wide found beneath Greenland glacier

A huge impact crater has been discovered under a half-mile-thick Greenlandice sheet. The enormous bowl-shaped dent appears to be the result of a mile-wide iron meteorite slamming into the island at a speed of 12 miles per second as recently as 12,000 years ago.

The impact of the 10bn-tonne space rock would have unleashed 47m times the energy of the Little Boy nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. It would have melted vast amounts of ice, sending freshwater rushing into the oceans, and blasted rocky debris high into the atmosphere.

At 19.3 miles wide, the crater ranks among the 25 largest known on Earth and is the first to be found beneath an ice sheet. “You have to go back 40 million years to find a crater of the same size, so this is a rare, rare occurrence in Earth’s history,” said Kurt Kjær, of the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

Scientists first suspected a crater in 2015 when they spotted a huge depression in Nasa radar images of the bedrock beneath the Hiawatha glacier in north-west Greenland. Kjær, who passes a 20-tonne meteorite to reach his office every day, wondered if such a space rock might be the culprit. “It all snowballed from there,” said Joseph MacGregor, a senior scientist on the team at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
. . .
So far it has been impossible to put a firm age on the crater, but its condition suggests it formed after ice began to cover Greenland about 3 million years ago. But the crater may have formed much more recently. The radar images show that while the surface layers of the glacier immediately above the crater look normal, deeper layers that are older than 12,000 years are badly deformed and strewn with rocks, with some lumps as big as trucks.

So, the Younger Dryas started about 12,000 years ago. When I saw this article I immediately thought about the possibility that it triggered the Younger Dryas, a thousand year cool period that occurred as the world was coming into the current interglacial.  Shockingly, I didn't get to that idea first: Massive crater under Greenland’s ice points to climate-altering impact in the time of humans

The news of the impact discovery has reawakened an old debate among scientists who study ancient climate. A massive impact on the ice sheet would have sent meltwater pouring into the Atlantic Ocean—potentially disrupting the conveyor belt of ocean currents and causing temperatures to plunge, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. "What would it mean for species or life at the time? It's a huge open question," says Jennifer Marlon, a paleoclimatologist at Yale University.

A decade ago, a small group of scientists proposed a similar scenario. They were trying to explain a cooling event, more than 1000 years long, called the Younger Dryas, which began 12,800 years ago, as the last ice age was ending. Their controversial solution was to invoke an extraterrestrial agent: the impact of one or more comets. The researchers proposed that besides changing the plumbing of the North Atlantic, the impact also ignited wildfires across two continents that led to the extinction of large mammals and the disappearance of the mammoth-hunting Clovis people of North America. The research group marshaled suggestive but inconclusive evidence, and few other scientists were convinced. But the idea caught the public's imagination despite an obvious limitation: No one could find an impact crater.

Proponents of a Younger Dryas impact now feel vindicated. "I'd unequivocally predict that this crater is the same age as the Younger Dryas," says James Kennett, a marine geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, one of the idea's original boosters.

But Jay Melosh, an impact crater expert at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, doubts the strike was so recent. Statistically, impacts the size of Hiawatha occur only every few million years, he says, and so the chance of one just 13,000 years ago is small. No matter who is right, the discovery will give ammunition to Younger Dryas impact theorists—and will turn the Hiawatha impactor into another type of projectile. "This is a hot potato," Melosh tells Science. "You're aware you're going to set off a firestorm?"

The Younger Dryas likely played an important role in the settlement of the New World by paleo- Amerindians. Clovis culture seems to have been established over wide areas of the North American by the time of the Younger Dryas, and disappeared afterwards.

Linked by EBL in Step your Thanksgiving turkey up...

Whew, Dodged a Bullet!

video of 2018 GE3

NASA: Previously Unknown Asteroid had a Near Miss with Earth today

With little warning, on Sunday, April 15th, a “Tunguska-class” asteroid about the size of a football field flew through the Earth-Moon system. 2018 GE3 was discovered just the day before as it plunged inward from the asteroid belt. A quick-thinking amateur astronomer in Europe was able to record a video of the asteroid as it flew by.

Earth and Moon and distance to scale
not so close

With little warning, a relatively large asteroid flew through the Earth-Moon system on April 15th only 192,200 km (0.5 Lunar Distance) from our planet. 2018 GE3 was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey approaching Earth on April 14th. Hours later, amateur astronomer Michael Jäger of Weißenkirchen Austria video-recorded the space rock rushing through the southern constellation Serpens:

“According to Wikipedia, 2018 GE3 is the largest known asteroid to pass that close to Earth in observational history,” says Jäger. “It was shining like a 13th magnitude star at the time of my observations.”

Based on the intensity of its reflected sunlight, 2018 GE3 must be 48 to 110 meters wide, according to NASA-JPL.

The Chelyabinsk meteor

That doesn't sound so big does it? But it really would create a huge impact due to the interplanetary velocities.

This puts it into the same class as the 60-meter Tunguska impactor that leveled a forest in Siberia in 1908. A more recent point of comparison is the Chelyabinsk meteor–a ~20-meter asteroid that exploded in the atmosphere over Russia on Feb. 15, 2013, shattering windows and toppling onlookers as a fireball brighter than the sun blossomed in the blue morning Ural sky. 2018 GE3 could be 5 to 6 times wider than that object.

Tunguska event slideshow

The Tunguska event would have been a lot more memorable if it had struck in a more inhabited area.

If 2018 GE3 had hit Earth, it would have caused regional, not global, damage, and might have disintegrated in the atmosphere before reaching the ground. Nevertheless, it is a significant asteroid, illustrating how even large space rocks can still take us by surprise. 2018 GE3 was found less than a day before before its closest approach.

Based on an observational arc of only 1 day, 2018 GE3 appears to follow an elliptical orbit which stretches from the asteroid belt to deep inside the inner solar system. Every ~2.5 years the space rock crosses the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars–although not necessarily making close approaches to the planets themselves.

This is something Donald Trump's "Space Force" can watch for, and learn to do something about when they aren't worrying about Chinese and Russian satellites.

Just a Meteor Flying Through an Erupting Volcano

I'm pretty sure the meteorite is way in the back, though. Found at the ONT.

The Unluckiest Guy in the World?

Indian Scientists Study Chunk that Fell From Sky, Killed Man

Scientists are analyzing a small blue object that plummeted from the sky and killed a man in southern India, after authorities said it was a meteorite.

The object slammed into the ground at an engineering college over the weekend, shattering a water cooler and sending splinters and shards flying. Police say a bus driver standing nearby was hit by the debris and died while being taken to a hospital.

College principal G. Bhaskar said he heard a loud thud from his office, where several window panes shattered when the object hit the ground.

Local officials and scientists from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics on Tuesday examined the 5-foot-wide (2-meter-wide) impact crater at the college near Vellore city, but said they had yet to determine whether the object was from outer space or possibly a passing airplane or man-made satellite.

College officials said window panes of the building shattered with the impact of the loud explosion. Several buses parked nearby were also damaged and bits of glass from broken windows were scattered in the buses.

The hard, jagged object is dark blue and small enough to be held in a closed hand. The scientists used metal detectors to check the crater for the presence of metals and dug up the soil.

"The object that police have recovered from the site would have to undergo chemical analysis" to confirm its origin, said the dean of the institute, Prof. G.C. Anupama. She said that while it was rare for meteors to reach the ground before burning up in the atmosphere, it happens.

As far as we know, no one has ever been killed by a meteorite before. Chances to win the Powerball are better.

Instapundit's Earth-Shattering Boom

'Meteorite' smashes into Nicaraguan capital

A mysterious explosion that rocked Nicaragua's crowded capital Managua, creating a large crater, appears to have been caused by a small meteorite, officials said Sunday.

Amazingly, in a sprawling city of 1.2 million people, the impact near the international airport did not cause any known injuries, but it did leave a crater measuring 12 meters (39 feet) across and was felt throughout the capital late on Saturday.

Nicaraguan authorities believe it was a piece of the small asteroid dubbed "2014 RC," which passed very close to Earth on Sunday and was estimated by astronomers to be about 20 meters big, or the size of a house.

"We are convinced that this was a meteorite. We have seen the crater from the impact," said Wilfredo Strauss of the Seismic Institute.

Well, it wasn't earth shattering, but it was a significant hole in the ground. Considering the alleged parent body, "2014 RC" was supposed to pass 25000 miles away from earth, it may be premature to blame this on it.

There is no such thing as absolute safety.

Catch a Falling Star and Put It In Your Pocket

Rats, he missed it: Meteorite narrowly misses Norwegian skydiver

A Norwegian man narrowly avoided being hit by a meteorite while skydiving and has captured the first ever video footage of a meteorite travelling through the air after its flame has gone out.

Anders Helstrup, who belongs to the Oslo Parachute Club said "I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn't register what was happening,"

"When we stopped the film, we could clearly see something that looked like a stone. At first it crossed my mind that it had been packed into a parachute, but it's simply too big for that."

A geologist confirmed that a meteorid had exploded about 20 kilometres above Mr Helstrup and his fellow skydivers when they made the historic jump in 2012. Ever since then, teams of experts and enthusiasts have been scouring the Norwegian countryside in search of the rock specimen that fell.

Better luck next time, Anders!

I Thought Lightning Strikes Were Traditional in Florida

7 year old struck by meteorites while playing outside 

Steven Lippard was in his driveway Saturday in Palm Beach County when he began bleeding.

The family initially thought he may have been hit by a golf ball or a bird, but then found several small rocks nearby.

The rocks were taken to Florida Atlantic University. Initial tests showed the rocks were metallic and could have come from space. Experts are now doing more tests to confirm the possibility.

Meteorite strikes around the world are incredibly rare but have happened in the past.

My understanding is that meteorites that have struck a building are very valuable to collectors, and that meteorites that struck a person are incredibly valuable as a result.  I hope the Lippards recognize this and get them back from FAU after they've been tested.  They might fund an entire college education. Or a hell of a party.

Remnants of Dinosaur Seas Found Under Chesapeake Bay

Oldest Large Body of Ancient Seawater Identified under Chesapeake Bay

USGS scientists have determined that high-salinity groundwater found more than 1,000 meters (0.6 mi.) deep under the Chesapeake Bay is actually remnant water from the Early Cretaceous North Atlantic Sea and is probably 100-145 million years old. This is the oldest sizeable body of seawater to be identified worldwide.

The Cretaceous Period, of course, is the era of the dinosaurs, and what good is a story about the dinosaur era without dinobabes to illustrate it?

Twice as salty as modern seawater, the ancient seawater was preserved like a prehistoric fly in amber, partly by the aid of the impact of a massive comet or meteorite that struck the area about 35 million years ago, creating Chesapeake Bay.

Interestingly, the salinity of the oceans, in the long run, is controlled  by evaporation, and formation of salts in great dry basins.

For example, much of the Mediterranean Sea is underlain by massive salt deposits left when the Med dried up during a period when it was cut off from the world ocean much like the Great Salt Lake is now.  The global ocean goes through large changes in average salinity, though over relatively long time periods.  Similar deposits around the world speaks to how common the process is geologically

"Previous evidence for temperature and salinity levels of geologic-era oceans around the globe have been estimated indirectly from various types of evidence in deep sediment cores," said Ward Sanford, a USGS research hydrologist and lead author of the investigation. "In contrast, our study identifies ancient seawater that remains in place in its geologic setting, enabling us to provide a direct estimate of its age and salinity."

 It is not inaccurate to say that the meteorite strike where the mouth of the Bay is today created the Bay as we know it.  The huge crate it blasted caused the rivers that would flow from the Appalachians to the coast to drain into the depression left.  It probably also destroyed most of the life on the east coast of North America.

The largest crater discovered in the United States, the Chesapeake Bay impact crater is one of only a few oceanic impact craters that have been documented worldwide.

About 35 million years ago a huge rock or chunk of ice traveling through space blasted a 56-mile-wide hole in the shallow ocean floor near what is now the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The force of the impact ejected enormous amounts of debris into the atmosphere and spawned a train of gigantic tsunamis that probably reached as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains, more than 110 miles away.

Wombat-Socho's grand compilation of Rule 5 posts,  "Rule 5 Monday: Palate Cleanser" is up at The Other McCain.

Meteor Flashes East Coast

NASA: Flash In East Coast Sky Likely A Meteor

NEW YORK (AP) — East Coast residents were buzzing on social media sites and elsewhere Friday night after a brief but bright flash of light streaked across the early-evening sky –in what experts say was almost certainly a meteor coming down.

Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environmental Office said the flash appears to be “a single meteor event.” He said it “looks to be a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports.”

“Judging from the brightness, we’re dealing with something as bright as the full moon,” Cooke said. “The thing is probably a yard across. We basically have (had) a boulder enter the atmosphere over the northeast.”

He noted that the meteor was widely seen, with more than 350 reports on the website of the American Meteor Society alone.

Darn, I missed it!  At least one friend reported having seen it on his way home.