The Russian Chelyabinsk Meteor was the largest since the 1908 Tunguska event. The airburst from the meteor on February 15, 2013, injured more than a thousand people and damaged thousands of buildings.
It marks the first time scientists can study in detail such an event with a range of modern instruments as well as assess its effects on a populated area. This briefing will offer some of the latest findings about the meteor itself, its explosion and effects, as well as how the incident suggests that smaller, more numerous meteors could pose greater threats to populated areas than previously thought.
Watch the video:
Just to be clear why many were injured: they heard the sound and rushed to the windows to see and glass shattered from the sound burst.
Michael Snow
Mr. Snow:
Just to be clear why many were injured: they heard the sound and rushed to the windows to see and glass shattered from the sound burst.
Wrong. They SAW THE FLASH! Which was BRILLIANT. Rush to the windows to find out what
caused that. THEN, about 15 seconds later the sonic boom came. THEN they were injured.
“Just to be clear why many were injured: they heard the sound and rushed to the windows to see and glass shattered from the sound burst.”
Er… they saw the *light* first. The sound (shockwave) was the part that did the damage.
It is very ironic that this very specific, very important – but very counter-instinctual !! – ‘Civil Defense training” was applied immediately by the Hiroshima surviors who evacuated the horrors of that city to seek shelter in Nagasaki.
One, in fact, was actually describing his “flash-boom-blast” experience to his family in Nagasaki when the second A-bomb exploded. They all immediately took cover (away from the windows) and all survived.
The “laughter” that today’s intellectuals aim at this well-founded “duck and cover” 1950’s training will be what saves a few. And that laughter at good practice and good lessons will be what kills, mains, and blinds millions when the next nuclear bomb or comet blasts above a city. But of course, today’s intellectuals MUST laugh at the lessons of the 50’s because they have been trained to hate and fear what was good about that times. Yes, we ALL need to correct the failures of that period as well, but the good is all the more fervently despised.
Tom G(ologist) says:
December 17, 2013 at 9:09 am
To Alan Robertson: I would agree with your response IF you had put some smiley emoticon after it. Your response implies a Christian-like absoluteness to knowledge. I have been skeptical of AGW sine 1989, so it took me one year to formulate doubts, but after all that time I still concede that I might be wrong.
Gareth – thanks for the post and the open minded attitude toward knowledge.
# Garethman, And thanks to you to Tom. One of the most difficult challenges on both sides in the debate is how to communicate uncertainty. Some people are very bad at it and resort to ‘ the science is settled’ attitude, others will not accept anything on principle. The reality is that there is a certain weight of evidence on some issues, but there is also much more uncertainty than most people will admit, and much subjectivity when interpreting research results. How to communicate this to both sides without sounding like you are admitting the main principles of your conclusions are wrong? There is a good debate on this site I was pointed to by WUWT. It’s from a warmist perspective, but seems pretty fair. By the way it was a site titled Wotts Up With That? until the host realised that while mimicry is a sincere form of flattery, it undermines your credibility, so she changed the name. http://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/communicating-uncertainty/
By the way, if we were certain when the next meteor would strike we would be in a useful position, but we don’t, however we do know one will strike at some uncertain point.
“This Island Earth” Trailer
If comet ISON was dislodged from the Oort by a passing star some millions of years ago shouldn’t we be looking for others? Why would only one comet be dislodged?
Re: mpainter @ur momisugly 0914:
“pyromancer76 says:
December 17, 2013 at 9:03 am
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This sort of garbage we do not need on this site. Take it somewhere else, please.”
There have been more than a few discussions of the Younger Dryas and what caused it on this site. Perhaps you missed them. Cheers –
If you like your cosmic debris airburst, you can keep your cosmic debris airburst.
In the video at 1.50 the speaker says ” It was a minor disaster compared with the very big ones like Fukushima…”. WTF? How many people died in the Fukushima plant? Zero. How does that qualify as very big? I assume he’s confusing it with the Tohoku Tsunami which killed 20,000.
Meteors! Comets! We’re doomed!
http://www.bokia.se/mediaarchive/1083108/kometen-kommer.jpg
“Dinosaur” is in cases synonymous with “dead” or “outdated”. Actually dinosaurs completely dominated the world for about 130 million years, commanding every little nook of it, so that pipsqueak creatures like mammals feared for their lives and mostly ended up as food for dinosaurs. However, dinosaurs had the unfortunate experience of riding a train bound for a spectacular collision, one that destroyed their world completely. The same “threat” is out there today. One wonders how some future being will use the word “human” if we fail to rise to that threat made real.
mpainter says:
December 17, 2013 at 9:14 am
pyromancer76 says:
December 17, 2013 at 9:03 am
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This sort of garbage we do not need on this site.
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one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.
Had cavemen been alive at the time of the dinosaurs we would still be arguing that Fred Flintstone caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Why should many other mysterious extinctions be any different?
~ +1:12 … “First ever asteroid impact disaster in human history.”
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How about Genesis 19?
ferdberple, we’re dealing with things that actually happened here, not stories.
Who will be here to record and pass on the ‘happenings’ on the next big ‘RESET’?
We don’t really know how many times life has been nearly ‘wiped out’ (excepting of course for roaches and ‘slip and fall’ lawyers) on the ‘earf’ due to cosmic-scale events .. or do we?
I tend to think we’ve been through ALL this before; nothing new under the sun.
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@ghost of the big jim cooley
There exists a lot of real in the dirt evidence for the impact that took out S & G. From wriiten records in several other cultures too including direct object sightings and the impact crater…
@MPainter.
Pyromancer is right. Comet Encke started breaking up about 20000 years ago. We pass through two of the debris fields often. Sometimes big chunks take out cities or even continents. Most likely the Younger Dryas impact that ended Clovis culture was a part of it. On about a 350 year cycle we move through the dense part of the field. We are presently away from the most dense, but that is changing. Taurids are not your friend.
Seeing that our planet is 75 % water and we are just getting to able to track and monitor small events, could strikes like this have an effect like “Rogue Waves”?
You temperature freaks (god bless you) don’t get it yet. These gentleman and their colleagues (for instance Alan Harris who is mentioned) constantly SUPRESS evidence that there is anything to be concerned about from above. Mark Boslough has trashed peer-reviewed evidence of past cosmic impact in historical times and accused the authors of fraud!: http://cosmictusk.com/holy-hagiography-over-the-top-press-joneses-mark-boslough/
Boslough has all but said what drives him to diminish evidence of past impacts — which would end technical civilization as we know it — is that does not want to see the public distracted from his and other’s constant political pimping of global warming fears. Look Boslough up. He is a global warming alarmist with few peers, yet has pooh-poohed and ignored vast oceans of data in support of an extremely underated hazard from the sky — the threat he is actually paid to study!
This is like a panel of the naked king tailors. Phonies on the run.