Incoming! Meteor Crash in Peru?

[Graalsword]

This seems to be the latest:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5isWWHSxCh_u0yUNU9Gpk1qfg996A

Meteorite Likely Caused Crater in Peru

By MONTE HAYES – 7 hours ago

As other astronomers learned more details, they too said it appears likely that a legitimate meteorite hit Earth on Saturday — an rare occurence.

LOL!!!! A rare ocurrence!! What kind of scientists are they? They are not updated regarding what is happening with the fireballs falling every week, or they are hidding information intentionally.

 

[Kieran]

LOL!!!! A rare ocurrence!! What kind of scientists are they?

It's quite obvious knowlaw.

They are EXPERTS!

Kieran

 

[Regulattor]

Well it's not Peru, but I think it is definitively related. Though I'm not so thrilled like guys in studio! I've even got this knot in my stomach feeling, while watching those clips. God, how am I worried!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7CfxeSUaeI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSCTxEBwauo

 

[Laura]

Well it's not Peru, but I think it is definitively related. Though I'm not so thrilled like guys in studio! I've even got this knot in my stomach feeling, while watching those clips. God, how am I worried!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7CfxeSUaeI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSCTxEBwauo

See this post here:
http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=7197.msg50812#msg50812

 

[Kieran]

Those are very impressive clips Regulattor! Especially the first one.

Thank you for posting them.

Though I'm not so thrilled like guys in studio!

I know exactly what you mean. And when the fireballs are coming in horizon to horizon I doubt the studio guys – typical airhead, giggly, media-anchor buffoons! – will be quite so thrilled either!

Not wanting to give you nightmares, but you might like to read Laura and Henry’s post here:

‘Forget About Global Warming: We’re One Step From Extinction’
http://laura-knight-jadczyk.blogspot.com/2007/03/forget-about-global-warming-were-one.html

Included within the article is the following. Condensed and adapted from Chapter 11 of Firestone, West and Warwick-Smith's book: The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization

It begins with meteors falling like raindrops, a few here and there. Perhaps a few hit the sun, provoking large solar flares. The solar flares provoke colourful auroras even in the daytime sky. Then the day of the comets arrive. From horizon to horizon, growing larger every second, they streaked into the atmosphere, lighting up brighter than the sun.

Heated to immense temperatures by its passage through the atmosphere, the lethal swarm exploded into thousands of mountain-sized chunks and clouds of streaming icy dust. The smaller pieces blew up high in the atmosphere, creating multiple detonations that turned the sky orange and red.

Then the largest comet smashed through the sheet of ice covering part of the northern hemisphere in what is now Hudson Bay. Other comets struck in Lake Michigan, Canada, Siberia and Europe. Then the ground shock waves hit, shaking the earth violently for ten minutes in great rolling waves and shudders. Fissures opened, trees shook and fell, and rivers and streams disappeared into the cracked earth.

Within seconds of the impact, the blast of superheated air expanded outward at more than 1,000 miles an hour, racing across the landscape, tearing trees from the ground and tossing them into the air, ripping rocks from mountainsides, and flash-scorching plants, animals, the earth, as well as any humans in its way. The only living things to survive would have been those who had sought shelter underground or underwater.

Across the upper part of North America and Europe, the immense energy from the multiple impacts blew a series of ever-widening, giant, overlapping bubbles that pushed aside the atmosphere to create a near vacuum inside. As the bubble passed by, the air pressure dropped making it difficult to breathe. Behind the expanding edge of the bubble, the Earth was stripped of the protective shield of the atmosphere. The blast had ejected tiny, fast-moving grains in all directions through the thin air. Some lodged into trees, plants and animals, while others went up only to fall back again at incredible speeds as there was no atmosphere to break their fall. At the same instant, high speed cosmic rays bombarded the area with radiation. Animals and humans dropped dead on the spot from the bombardment. Inanimate objects appeared to come to life and shiver and quake on the ground from the barrage.

When the outward push of the shock wave ceased, the vacuum began to draw back the air. As the expanded atmosphere rushed back toward the impact site, the bubbles collapsed, sucking white-hot gases and dust inwards at tornado speeds and then channelling them up and away from the ground. Some of the dust escaped from the Earth's atmosphere while the rest flowed out as a red mushroom cloud that flattened out for thousands of miles across the upper atmosphere, blocking the sun and engulfing the Earth in darkness.

The dust and debris that was too heavy began crashing back down to earth. Still superhot from the blast, it gave off a powerful lavalike glow. The pieces landed on the continental ice sheet, instantly melting untold gallons of water that coursed off the ice sheet in all directions causing flooding.

The raging updraft through the hollow bubbles created an equally powerful downdraft of frigid, high-altitude air, travelling at hundreds of miles per hour. With temperatures exceeding 150 degrees F below zero, the downward stream of air hit the ground and radiated out from the many blast sites in all directions, flash-freezing within seconds everything it touched. The howling, frigid blast turned trees and plants into brittle ice statues and flash froze mastodons and mammoths with food in their mouths that we have uncovered still frozen in Siberia.

The rapid temperature fluctuations meant the end of millions of plants and animals.... but the destruction was only beginning.

The impacts and shock waves triggered enormous earthquakes along existing fault lines from the Carolinas to California while shaking awake dormant volcanoes from Iceland across to the Pacific. Erupting with furious activity, they spewed hot lava across the landscape and noxious chemicals into the air, adding to the already heavy cloud cover.

The impacts, the blast waves, and the eruptions started thousands of ground fires wherever there was fuel to feed them, some of which continued to burn for days. Fast-moving, wind-driven wildfires formed spiralling tongues of raging flames that twisted for thousands of feet into the air and the inferno raced through forests faster than birds and animals could flee. The roar of the fire shook the ground, and the fierce heat blew apart trees like bombs, exploded rocks like shrapnel grenades, and set off steam explosions wherever the fast-moving fire-front jumped across frozen ponds and streams. When the fires had finally burned themselves out, there was little left besides smoldering stumps and telltale charcoal strewn across the continents.

The noxious chemicals in the atmosphere fell back to earth as poisoned rain. In some places, the air was too toxic and oxygen-depleted to support life.

The impact in Hudson Bay sent up 200,000 cubic miles of the glacier, throwing off the icy debris that followed the pieces of the comet out across the continent. A rain of incandescent debris and chunks of steaming ice showered down across most of North America, Europe and Asia. Within minutes, the massive, low-flying clumps crashed into the Carolinas and the eastern seaboard, exploding into fireballs and gouging out the Carolina Bays, over 500,000 of them. Other lumps exploded across the plains from Nebraska and Kansas to Arizona.

Pieces of flying ice and debris, large and small, fell from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic, from Europe over to Asia and even down to Africa. More than one-quarter of the planet was under siege.

But even that was not all.

The impact through the glacier at Hudson Bay sent high velocity meltwater surging under the ice sheet. The surges lifted and floated large sections of ice, causing monolithic ice blocks to slide southward along hundreds of miles of the ice front. Moving nearly as quickly as a horse is able, the blocks plowed over forests, shearing off the trees.

The oceans, too, were targets. Thousands of ice chunks and clouds of slushy water hit the Atlantic, exploding with colossal detonations. The multiple concussions triggered immense underwater landslides off the Carolinas and Virginia, releasing thousands of cubic miles of mud. In turn, the mud unleashed a 1,000 foot high tidal wave that raced away towards Europe and Africa at 500 miles an hour.

Nine hours later the wave hit, 1,000 feet tall at 400 miles per hour, probably taking with it some of the survivors of the first explosions. The wave broke over hundreds of miles inland, devastating everything in its path. Anything living on the coast was killed instantly.

Its momentum spent, the churning water paused briefly and then began its rush backwards to the coast, pulling with it the battered remains of plants and animals under its tow. The surge provoked, in turn, offshore landslides in Europe and Africa, sending a second round of megawaves back towards North and South America. Miles of coastland was hit by the 100 foot waves that triggered yet another wave of tsunamis that hit Europe and Africa once again. But little was left to damage.

Within minutes of the impacts, the subzero air and rising water vapour combined to produce heavy snow and sleet that reached as far south as Mexico, the Caribbean, and Northern Africa. In the south, the snow turned to rain and the northern hemisphere was under a steady downpour for months, a downpour of noxious water contaminated and deadly. Anyone lucky enough to survive was now a potential victim of acid, taxis metals, cyanide, formaldehyde, and arsenic, a combination that would kill many and render the rest gravely ill.

The melted water of the glaciers had another effect: flooding into the North Atlantic, it turned off the ocean conveyor that brought warm water to the northern climes. Once shut off, coupled with the clouds of dust blocking the sun, the temperature fell drastically. Within days or weeks after the impacts, continental temperatures fell well below freezing, and a brutal ice age chill once again spread across the land, remaining in place for another thousand years.

And all of this in an instant, in less time than it takes to cook a meal or write an email.

Kind of makes a bit of a joke of some of the survival kits/advice being advertised at the moment doesn't it?

In the above scenario who could possibly know where would be 'safe'? And I doubt that a 6 months supply of tinned beans, a strong canvas tent and a water purifier would help much either!

But do whatever you feel you must. And don't lose sleep. Remember:

"Did you want to live forever?"

Kieran

 

[Z...]

Are these people for real

I think at least one of them should wear T-shirt saying: ' I'm with stupid!'
Its too much even for American TV presenter:

Dork: I tracked those- those meteors as we think that they are. And I found it
Hyena 1 and Hyena 2 in unison: Thats amazing!
Dork: Starbucks meteor shower!
Hyenas Laughing
Dork: Actually there is a formal name, they are called Qua-dranth-itds
Hyena 2: Woow
Dork: Well I am not quite sure how to say that.
Hyena 1 : Ok
Hyena2: How do you know that?
Dork: They are meteors from extinct constellation. They peak around January and they are often hard to see because north sky is usually cloudy.
(showing footage of meteors)
Hyena1: And here it goes
Hyena2:Wow
Hyena1:It looks like rocket exploding
Hyena 2: That is so amazing
Hyena 1: "And then fizzles away, thats...daah,,, I cannot understand...why is it just fizzle away the way we are going to see it fizzle?

Dork: I don't know

Hyena2 laughing

Hyena 1: You know it all Tom!

Hyena2: As he said he is a meteorologist not mediaologist

Dork: I just dont know..uhm..I mean ..they die... they lose that light..they r burning up..and they are Qua -dranth- ids as they are formally called so there you go. Amazing video. I am so happy that someone captured that. I wonder if we are the only one to get that.

 

[Rick]

One Peruvian health official is blaming "collective psychosis" for the sickness. I think the only collective psychosis is among the "experts" who keep trying to debunk the story:

"The day after it fell, we heard this might be worth some money, so we went to pick up everything that was out there," said Eugenio Vilalla, 30. "But there was this terrible smell, really strong, and it gave everyone a headache.

"So the people picked up a few little stones and went home to rest and take a matecito," Villala said, referring to coca-leaf tea, a common cure-all here.

Since then, hundreds have reported maladies, including headaches and nausea. But experts said the reactions probably were imagined. There is no evidence of radiation at the site, officials said.

"Those who say they are affected are the product of a collective psychosis," said Jorge Lopez Tejada, health department chief in Puno, the nearest city.

I think what really has the "experts" scared is that land only comprises about 25% of the earth's surface, which means 75% of these meteors are crashing in the ocean unobserved, not to mention the near misses.

 

[Regulattor]

Kieran, I've already "absorbed" this article, thx anyway!
On your comment:

Kind of makes a bit of a joke of some of the survival kits/advice being advertised at the moment doesn't it?

In the above scenario who could possibly know where would be 'safe'? And I doubt that a 6 months supply of tinned beans, a strong canvas tent and a water purifier would help much either!

But do whatever you feel you must. And don't lose sleep. Remember:

"Did you want to live forever?"

Kieran

- I guess places like underground Dulce, Denver airport, Florida off coast, deep Amazonia etc., would provide some cover, but something tells me that only "chosen ones" gonna get entry pass! At least for the rest of us will be like "...front row seat..."!

- I'm not afraid for myself, but I have two little daughters and their future is my greatest concern! It's from there most of my fears originate.

 

[Alada]

There's this Flashback up on Signs now, an article from May this year in India that echoes the headaches/nausea reported:

40 Foot Crater 'Caused by Lightning': Locals Report Headaches and Nausea

Agencies - Sat, 26 May 2007

Smoke and flame are found emanating from a 40-feet long and two feet wide crater, caused by lightning which struck last afternoon at Talaikuda village on the outskirts of Udhagamandalam.

According to official sources, nearly 300 eucalyptus trees were burnt, following the lightning, which hit the area, and big crater was formed.

The smoke, which was found last evening, continued emanating heavily today and a flame was visible deep below eight feet, the sources said.

People, who went near it, felt burning sensation in eyes, headache and nausea.

Experts from Geological Survey of India, who visited the area, have informed their higherups in Chennai, about the development.

Some of them opined that the gas could be methane. However, they ruled out the possibility of earthquake or eruption of volcano from inside the crater.

But people in the area, majority of them tribals, were living in fear, the sources said.

The mention in this report below about a "luminous substance" maybe fits with the "flame was visible deep below eight feet" from the Indian story above, in a 'lost in translation' way?

Peru Meteorite May Have Sickened 150 People, Ministry Says

By Alex Morales - Sept. 19 (Bloomberg)

A possible meteorite strike may have sickened more than 150 people in southern Peru, the country's health ministry said.

People who ventured near the site of the Sep. 15 strike by the ''supposed'' meteorite were affected by dizziness, vomiting and skin lesions, the ministry said yesterday in a statement on its Web site. Among the people afflicted were eight police officers who went to the crater near the southeastern towns of Carancas and Desaguadero, the ministry said.

The object that crashed to Earth created a crater 15 meters (50 feet) wide and 5 meters deep, the ministry said. Locals said they became ill after handling a luminous substance at the site that they thought might be valuable, according to the statement.

''Blood tests are being carried out on most of the patients to determine what they're suffering from,'' the ministry said. ''Specialists in epidemiology and environmental health are already in the area to collect samples of the supposed meteorite for analysis.''

Last Updated: September 19, 2007 08:07 EDT

Meanwhile Pravda is carrying the Sorcha Fall piece, and there's even a theory that it could have been a Scud missle!

 

[Laura]

There's a lot of information about the "electrical universe" on the web, so perhaps a meteor could have a high electrical charge like a bolt of lightning?

This was definitely a "kaboom, splat!"

 

[Kieran]

I guess places like underground Dulce, Denver airport, Florida off coast, deep Amazonia etc., would provide some cover[…]

Well, if those big ol’ continental plates start to slide and shift, and some serious tectonic forces get under way – in other words, if good ol’ Mother Earth really goes into one of her ‘deep cleansing routines’ – then those secure underground bases could turn into secure underground tombs!

I'm not afraid for myself, but I have two little daughters and their future is my greatest concern! It's from there most of my fears originate.

I know.

I mean, I really know!

I have a sixteen year old daughter and a twelve year old son.

My daughter got excellent grades in her ‘O’ Levels this year, and has now started her ‘A’ levels. She keeps talking to me about what she wants to do – teaching – and which University should she go to?

My son has decided he wants to be a computer programmer. (And develop ‘wicked’ computer games! Lol!)

What do you say? Having a sick feeling in your stomach about what is likely to come down on us within the next few years!

Well, I talk to them as a father normally would about his children’s plans and future ideas.

But I have also done my best to tell them about what appears to be really happening in this world, and some likely future scenarios!

As none of their peers have heard anything like what I have told them – which presumably means that none of their peers’ parents have either! – they think their Dad is ‘a bit weird’!

But I don’t push it. I encourage them in their aspirations for the future.

And we have agreed that when the world has calmed down in a few years time, and is ‘a much nicer place’ (their words), we will all have a good laugh at Dad’s current ‘weirdness.’ But I also added, that if things should pan out somewhere along the alternatives I have told them about, at least THEY (among their peers) will have some understanding of what is happening. (And in my own mind, unspoken, is the thought: “Even if I am not here to help you get through it!”)

It is very difficult when you have young children Regulattor.

Sadly, I am sure many people in this Forum are in the same position.

Kieran

 

[Mike]

I've been thinking about the sickness aspect of the meteorite and that it is a mystery. Wouldn't an meteorite of that size composed of some part iron mess with the earths magnetic field as it came crashing down? Maybe this could explain why no radiation is found and that their are no reports of people that came to the scene afterwards getting sick. Did some searching and here are a couple things I found:

Psst! Sounds like a meteor: in the debate about whether or not meteors make noise, skeptics have had the upper hand until now - Now Hear This

_http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_6_111/ai_87854873

Reports of noisy meteors date back to at least the year 817, when a Chinese observer documented a meteor with a sound "like a flock of cranes in flight." In 1676, Italian astronomer Geminiano Montanari observed one that sounded like "the rattling of a great Cart running over Stones." Montanari was also the first to doubt his ears: his calculations put the meteor thirty-eight miles up in the sky--too far away, he knew, for its sound to reach him instantly. A spectacular Leonid storm in 1833 generated further anecdotes of meteors that swished, whooshed, or, in one case, "resembled the noise of a child's popgun." Failing any suitable explanation, however, the reports were again dismissed as figments of imagination.

There the matter rested for a century and a half. How could sound waves travel at the speed of light? A few inconclusive experiments were conducted. Tenuous theories arose and sank. Finally in 1980, Colin Keay, of the University of Newcastle in Australia, offered a strange yet geophysically rational explanation. As meteors fall through Earth's magnetic field, he proposed, they generate radio signals audible to the human ear.

Ordinarily that would be impossible, Keay knew. Radio waves are electromagnetic, not acoustic. Acoustic waves are vibrations of molecules: when a wing flaps, it compresses the surrounding air in a series of waves that reach the inner ear and are perceived as sound. Electromagnetic waves, which include radio signals and visible light, don't need a medium to propagate and don't make an impression on the human ear. Even radio waves of 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz--quite low frequencies, corresponding to the range of acoustic frequencies that humans can register as sound--are, by themselves, inaudible.

To bridge this gap, humans invented the transducer, a device that efficiently translates electromagnetic waves into physical, air-moving waves and hence sound. Amazingly, in laboratory experiments Keay found that even ordinary objects can act as transducers. Slips of paper, aluminum foil, even eyeglasses: when Keay exposed them to rapidly shifting electromagnetic fields (that is, radio waves of very low frequency), the objects oscillated ever so slightly, creating weak--and faintly audible--acoustic waves.

Keay postulated that the same thing happens outdoors under a meteor shower: falling meteors generate very low-frequency radio signals that travel at the speed of light to the ground, where they cause pine needles, blades of grass, and other small objects to tremble slightly and whisper to any stargazer within earshot. Mundane objects become celestial heralds, instantly announcing the arrival of shooting stars. A meteor plummets, and the lawn chair or the pine tree speaks.

Abnormal sounds produced by meteors

_http://miac.uqac.ca/MIAC/son-e.htm

"... a phenomenon called electrophonics. What this is about is when you see a fireball of course the sound doesn't travel as fast as light! So normally you hear the sound two or three minutes or... ten minutes later depending on how far you are. But for many years, all the way back to ancient times, people have reported seeing fireballs and hearing sounds like crackling sounds or whistling sounds or swishing sounds; sounds like a jet airplane and so on at the same time they see the fireball. And for many years right up into the 1980's no one believed that it was a true phenomenon. They thought it was in the observer's head, it was their imagination and so on. And now there is a growing body of knowledge that suggests that the fireball emits a type of electromagnetic radiation called "Very Low Frequency radiation" in the tens of kilohertz range and what then happens is this: The electromagnetic radiation is given off by the fireball, and it is so intense that objects around the person like hair or steel objects like glasses or wire or wire-meshes of fences vibrate, actually physically vibrate, as a result of this electromagnetic field. And as they vibrate, if it is intense enough, this can actually produce the sound at a few tens of kilohertz at exactly the same frequency in the VLF as people hear normal sounds. Thus you end up with a fireball passing nearby and at the same time they see the object, they hear this whistling or crackling sound from the transduction of the VLF waves. And they're not actually hearing sound from the fireball but rather hearing sound from local objects vibrating in response to the intense VLF emission of the fireball; this is called transduction. And so people have heard these sounds for years, but without having been able to convincingly detect the accompanying VLF emission; but we have done that. In 1994 we went to France and we put up an antenna system that has a lot of gain in the VLF (plus filtering) and actually registered a bright fireball that was giving off Very Low Frequency radiation. This is strong proof that it is VLF emission which is producing the simultaneous sounds which people have been hearing for years. The theory behind the VLF emission is due to Colin Keay at the University of Newcastle in Australia; it is not what I consider a complete theory, more heuristic in nature, (even Colin would admit this) but it is the best we have at the moment. It goes something like this: the plasma train behind the fireball entrains the Earth's magnetic field and "distorts" this field and as the field relaxes after fireball passage, like a few milliseconds afterwards, the field unwinds and as it unwinds it emits the VLF waves. But the precise mechanism is not really well understood. More work needs to be done in this area of investigation. Electrophonic sounds are covered in a good article by Colin Keay in 1991 in "Meteoritics" where he talks all about the specific details: entry angles and what you need to produce it such as the turbulence that you need in a big fireball to produce VLF emission. So all meteorite falls don't produce it but BIG fireballs do." Our article on the detection in France appeared in Earth, Moon and Planets, v.68, (1995), pp. 181-188.

Microwaves And Microwave Ovens

_http://webpages.charter.net/jdrzeczycki/Healthsite/microwave.html

The Russians did research on thousands of workers who had been exposed to microwaves during the development of radar in the 1950’s. Their research showed health problems so serious that the Russians set strict limits of 10 microwatts for workers and one microwatt for lay people. In the above-mentioned book, Becker described research of the Russians on the health effects of microwave radiation, which they called microwave sickness. He says (page 314)

“Its first signs are low blood pressure and slow pulse. The later and most common manifestations are chronic excitation of the sympathetic nervous system (stress syndrome) and high blood pressure. This phase also often includes headache, dizziness, eye pain, sleeplessness, irritability, anxiety, stomach pain, nervous tension, inability to concentrate, hair loss, plus an increased incidence of appendicitis, cataracts, reproductive problems, and cancer. The chronic symptoms are eventually succeeded by crises of adrenal exhaustion and ischemic heart disease (blockage of coronary arteries and heart attack).”

Behavioral and Neural Effects of High Magnetic Fields

_http://www.magnet.neuro.fsu.edu/Research/magneticfields.html

This project is exciting because we have shown that rodents are possessed of a completely novel sensory ability to detect magnetic fields. Furthermore, our research is of great potential significance to public health and medical practice. Although the magnetic fields of typical clinical MRI machines are only 1-4 Tesla in strength, experimental MRI machines are reaching fields of 9 Tesla and higher. These high strength MRI machines have the advantage of being able to resolve anatomical structures nearly to the level of individual cells. While numerous studies have demonstrated that there is no long-term effect of MRI scans on most of the body, we think it is important to know that some patients may experience nausea and dizziness, and potentially long-term inner ear damage after high field exposure.

 

[Kieran]

Hi Mike

I've been thinking about the sickness aspect of the meteorite and that it is a mystery. Wouldn't an meteorite of that size composed of some part iron mess with the earths magnetic field as it came crashing down? Maybe this could explain why no radiation is found and that their are no reports of people that came to the scene afterwards getting sick.

I think you have presented an excellent hypothesis.

Reading through the articles you present it would seem that turbulence caused by a meteorite tumbling through the Earth’s magnetic field may explain a number of phenomena – which the ‘EXPERTS’, of course, tend to dismiss as “impossible” and put down to ‘imagination’ and ‘group psychosis’.

The Very Low Frequencies generated then, may explain:

1. Sounds heard from a meteor sighted many miles high/distant. I.e. VLF resonance within surrounding, nearby material.
2. Dizziness, sickness and vomiting. Documented as occurring in micro-wave and high magnetic field exposure. And as you say, would explain why late arrivals to the scene – after the field disturbance has dissipated – would not feel any ill effects.

I noted this comment at the end of the second article you posted:

”[…] entry angles and what you need to produce it such as the turbulence that you need in a big fireball to produce VLF emission. So all meteorite falls don't produce it but BIG fireballs do."

Well, an impact crater of 40-50ft diameter and 15ft depth is not small. So what size must the meteor have been when it entered our upper atmosphere … about 40 miles up?

Begins to seem to me like the “first heavy raindrops ….”

Lets keep our eyes open for more incoming!

Good research Mike. Thank you.

Kieran

 

[Laura]

Another point to mention: since this has been confirmed as a meteor strike, we need to reformulate what we consider to be evidence of previous meteor impacts. As I noted, that crater did not look like any of the craters I have looked at - or the impact craters on the moon, etc. It was quite different. In fact, I begin to wonder if what we call "impact craters" might not be craters made by very powerful overhead exploding meteors?

With that in mind, we may have a LOT more impact craters on this planet than formerly supposed.

 

[Laura]

Abnormal sounds produced by meteors

_http://miac.uqac.ca/MIAC/son-e.htm

"... a phenomenon called electrophonics. What this is about is when you see a fireball of course the sound doesn't travel as fast as light! So normally you hear the sound two or three minutes or... ten minutes later depending on how far you are. But for many years, all the way back to ancient times, people have reported seeing fireballs and hearing sounds like crackling sounds or whistling sounds or swishing sounds; sounds like a jet airplane and so on at the same time they see the fireball. And for many years right up into the 1980's no one believed that it was a true phenomenon. They thought it was in the observer's head, it was their imagination and so on. <snip>

So all meteorite falls don't produce it but BIG fireballs do." Our article on the detection in France appeared in Earth, Moon and Planets, v.68, (1995), pp. 181-188.

On this subject, In Mike Baillie's book, Exodus to Arthur, he writes:

There are two types of physical body which can hit the Earth, namely, comets and asteroids. In the past ancient people had seen and recorded comets; the bright gaseous plume which is illuminated by the sun was often described as a bow, or sword, or arm in the sky. There are no obvious records of asteroids, small dark bodies which are effectively invisible without a telescope, and not that easy to spot even with large telescopes. Astronomers have devoted quite a lot of time to asteroids because, from a hazard point of view, the most interesting ones are locked into orbits in the inner solar system. But perhaps the interest is actually stimulated by the fact that most of the early ones were discovered by accident and some are in Earth-crossing orbits. [...]

It is now known that the comets we see originate from what is effectively a shell of comets called the Oort Cloud which sits far out on the fringes of the solar system. From time to time gravitational effects from passing stars, or changes in our sun's position relative to the galactic plane, displace comets from the Oort Cloud into the solar system; some of these comets penetrate the inner solar system where we reside.

As already noted, objects moving inside the inner solar system represent a definite hazard to inhabitants of this planet. Looked at simplistically, we are trapped in the middle of a target, orbiting close to the bullseye (the Sun) and from time to time objects are fired towards the centre of the target.

Then, just to make the game more interesting, there is a deflector (in this case the giant planet Jupiter) whose gravitational field is sufficiently strong that it mops up most of the incoming missiles and either captures them or fires most of them back, away from the target. Unfortunately, the deflector is not 100 per cent successful and it actually encourages some material towards the target: worse still, it sometimes breaks the missile up and fires a scatter of debris inwards to the target. Though the reality is much more complicated than this simple model, the model is sufficient to get the feel of the problem.[...]

[Special note: notice that Baillie has reported that Jupiter is a "comet attractor." Consider that in light of all the recent discoveries of "new moons" of Jupiter, the numbers going higher almost daily!]

Comets are loosely compacted, but deeply frozen, hard, masses of rock and ice and organic materials, debris left over from the formation of the solar system. The common term 'dirty snowball' only half does them justice. [...] A snowball is typically thrown at a velocity of around ten metres per second; a comet is typically travelling at 20 to 50 km per second! [72,000 mph] So do not think of dirty snowballs; think of psychopathic iceballs. [...]

While the asteroid population in the inner solar system is relatively stable, and as lumps of rock or nickel-iron the asteroids themselves are pretty stable, comets are a bit more diverse. Normally a few kilometer or miles across, they can be captured into fairly stable orbits which can be or long or short periods - a few years or thousands of years. These long-return types will normally appear out of the blue and are not much different from a completely new comet [...]

Then there are giant comets up to hundreds of kilometers across. [...] If left orbiting long enough, all the comet's volatiles will eventually burn off and only the rocky core will be left, effectively indistinguishable from an asteroid. So there are at least two broad classes of hazard from comets: interaction between a live comet and the Earth and interaction between a dead comet and the Earth, with the latter being indistinguishable from the asteroid hazard. [...]

We need to think a little bit more about this idea of being hit - what does it mean in reality.

Well, there are hits and there are near-misses. We can imagine the simple case. A boulder whizzes in and hits the Earth directly at high velocity. Depending on the size of the boulder and the velocity, there is an explosion ranging from the equivalent of a few kilotons to hundreds of millions of megatons. It is clear that nothing in the latter class has occurred in even the last few million years - though we did witness those impacts on Jupiter in July 1994. In this direct hit scenario it is immaterial whether the object was an asteroid or a dead or live comet; size and velocity are all that matter. However, near-misses are a different thing altogether.

A near-miss with an asteroid is just that: 'whoosh - that was lucky', and as mentioned, we have had several of those in recent times.

A near-miss with a comet, whether it is dead or alive, may be very different. Because cometary nuclei are 'loosely packed' there is a tendency for them to be torn apart by the gravitational fields of the Sun or the planets in any close situations.

So we can be pretty sure that cometary nuclei are not travelling alone; there is likely to be a whole hierarchy of fragments. This could happen in a single pass or it could happen over a number of orbits. Such activity might lead to loading of the Earth's atmosphere with dust and maybe even volatiles and, as Clube and Napier, and Bailey and Steel, and Vershuur and others would argue, with the possibility of multiple Tunguska-class impacts - the 'cosmic swarm.' Simple mathematics indicate that for every comet that would hit us, about 4,000 pass closer to us than one Earth-Moon distance.

This introduction to cometary hazards tells us that the real problem on the timescale of civilization is the debris associated with a 'close pass' comet, irrespective of whether the comet was dead or alive. As we will see, the comet would fairly certainly blow your mind. [...]

What, I asked myself, would actually happen in a close approach? I sought out Gerry McCormac, a colleague who had trained and worked as an atmospheric physicist. [...] When asked what he thought would happen if a comet approached very close to the earth, his reply was startling:

If it came within the earth's magnetosphere it would probably be spectacular ... the sky would go purple or green, particles from the comet would spiral down the lines of force and it is likely that you would have amazing auroral displays and coloured streamers...

Suddenly a new series of possibilities had opened up. One had to try to imagine a cometary body, or associated debris, passing within the Earth's magnetosphere and possibly producing a fabulous, moving, coloured display. So I asked if there would be any other associated phenomena - noise maybe? He replied: "Well, the Eskimos say that at the time of aurora they sometimes hear a hissing noise ... but! ...scientists who took up sensitive listening equipment did not manage to record anything.' [...]

There is a whole literature on auroral sounds and, indeed, sounds heard directly from bolides, even comets. Colin Keay has written extensively on these phenomena. [...]

People have claimed that they have heard an incoming fireball and in fact heard it and turned around to see it. There is the contradiction: the flash of light from the fireball is travelling much faster than any related sound.

Traditional wisdom holds that we cannot actually hear fireballs coming in, we may hear the rumble and explosion only some time later, usually after we have seen them. Keay has accumulated information showing that some people genuinely do hear fireballs as they come in and before they see them: how? The plasma trail from a large fireball may generate Extra Low or Very Low Frequency radio emissions; if an observer happens to be standing beside a suitable object (or perhaps if he is wearing a suitable object like glasses or headgear, that object can act as a transducer for the electromagnetic signal - thus the observer actually 'hears' the incoming fireball as it enters the atmosphere, before seeing it.

The technical name for this phenomenon is 'geophysical electrophonics.' [Baillie, Exodus to Arthur, Batsford; London, 1999]

I quoted the above in my article "Independence Day" four years ago.