Death from the Skies! Read Free Page A

a nap that was rather rudely interrupted. Her hand and side were injured. She lived, but suffered one of the nastiest bruises in medical history.
    This may be the earliest well-documented case of a meteorite damaging human property. But it wasn’t the last. With the advent of the video camera, it was inevitable that more and more spectacular meteors would be recorded.
    On October 2, 1992, a meteoroid the size of a school bus entered the Earth’s atmosphere. It created a huge fireball as it traveled northeast across the United States, and was witnessed by thousands of people—by a happy coincidence, it was on a Friday night during football season, so many proud parents were already running their video cameras, yielding excellent footage of the meteor. The rock broke apart as it ripped its way across the sky, and one of the pieces, roughly the size of a football, fell onto the trunk of a young woman’s car in Peekskill, New York. It left a hole in the back end of the car that looked, not surprisingly, exactly as if it had been caused by a rock dropped from a great height. One can imagine the difficulty the owner had getting her insurance company to pay for the damage.
    These and other stories notwithstanding, in the end the Earth’s surface is big, and most meteorites are small. The odds of anyone’s getting hit by one are really very small, and the odds of being killed by one are even smaller.

    As it burned its way through the Earth’s atmosphere, the Peekskill meteor was captured on dozens of home movie cameras. It broke into smaller chunks, one of which hit a woman’s car.
     
    SARAH EICHMILLER AND THE ALTOONA (PA) MIRROR
    Still, most meteorites are small. Some aren’t.

SHALLOW IMPACT
    On June 30, 1908, the Earth and a smallish chunk of pretty weak rock found themselves at the same place at the same time.
    The rock was probably seventy or so yards across. Its orbit intersected the Earth’s, and over time it was inevitable that the two objects would both be located at that intersection point simultaneously.
    It came in over Siberia, in a remote region near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. On that day, it entered the Earth’s atmosphere over Russia, traveling northwest. It plunged deeper into the air, and the increasing pressure put tremendous strain on the meteoroid. It broke apart, and each piece broke apart, and the cascade of rupture dumped a vast amount of energy into the air around it. The object exploded, releasing between three and twenty megatons of energy: the equivalent of three to twenty million tons of TNT, hundreds of times as much energy as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima thirty-seven years later.
    The blast itself was seen by hundreds of witnesses (the Soviet Union even created a stamp based on what was seen), and the explosion registered on seismometers designed to detect earthquakes. People were knocked off their feet hundreds of miles away.
    Despite the incredible event and the excitement it generated, a scientific expedition took years to mount. The region is unbelievably difficult to reach; in winter it’s forbidding at best (we’re talking Siberia after all), and in the summer the Tunguska region is a swamp, infested with mosquitoes. But eventually the site was reached, and what greeted those weary travelers had never been seen before.
    As they approached the area of the explosion, the expedition members were shocked to see trees flattened like toothpicks for hundreds of square miles. Moreover, the trees were lying in parallel formations. Following the trail, the scientists came to a spot where the trees were all knocked over radially, like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Even weirder, the trees at ground zero were still standing, though totally denuded of branches and leaves. It’s hard to imagine what they must have felt upon seeing such an eerie sight.
    No blast crater was ever found, nor (yet) any definitive debris from the rock. It exploded several miles above the ground, and totally