A Massive Meteor Hit Earth Last Year; Almost No One Noticed
A massive meteor explosion over the Bering Sea three months ago went completely unnoticed until just now, when scientists reviewed low-frequency acoustic wave data picked up by global recording stations. The 32-foot diameter meteor exploded on Dec. 18, releasing 173 kilotons of energy – about 10 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
This latest meteor explosion was the second largest impact in the past 30 years, coming in behind the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013 which caused a number of injuries and was widely captured on video.
But unlike Chelyabinsk, this recent explosion took three months to be detected by a scientist studying infrasound data, which is inaudible to humans, but recorded by 16 monitoring stations around the world. The explosion is even being compared to the Tunguska event of 1908, during which a meteorite leveled an area of Siberia that included somewhere in the range of 80 million trees.
The explosion occurred in an incredibly remote area of the planet over an ocean where, luckily, no air traffic was passing through at that moment. But the fact that meteors this size with devastating potential, can enter the atmosphere almost undetected is a little unsettling.
While it wasn’t witnessed or officially recognized until now, footage from a Japanese weather satellite happened to capture an image of the explosion as it entered the atmosphere between Russia and Alaska.
The meteor explosion caught by the Japanese Himawari-8 satellite Simon Proud, University of Oxford/Japan Meteorological Agency
Scientists often refer to a meteorite this size as a city-buster due to its potential to level an entire city, and bolides this size tend to enter our atmosphere a few times per century.
Reassuringly, most of the larger asteroids floating in our general vicinity have been mapped out and are regularly monitored by scientists at various observatories – even if we don’t necessarily have the means to deflect them if they were on a crash course with Earth.
But these mid-size rocks are particularly troubling, especially as man-made space debris can lead to collisions and changes in trajectory.
The technology and cataloging of 90 percent of all near-Earth asteroids larger than 450 feet in diameter is underway, but may take several decades. But these are only the rare nation-busters that would wipe out an entire country; mapping out all of the smaller city-busters is something that hasn’t really been considered, if it’s even possible.
Seems like it might be time someone builds a machine learning algorithm to do that for us.
For more on near-miss asteroids check out this episode of Beyond Belief with Dan Durda:
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How to Prepare for Upcoming Solar and Lunar Eclipses
Eclipse season will be here soon, here’s what you can expect and how to prepare for this cosmic dance between the Sun, Moon, and Earth.
Both solar and lunar eclipses hold strong energy in astrology. They can shake us up and stimulate change within ourselves to reach our highest power. We will soon see a partial solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse. What can we expect from these cosmic events?
“Eclipses take place when we have lunar events, which are full moons or new moons that fall close to the nodal axis,” Astrologer Mercedes Arnus Arraut said. “So what is the nodal axis? The nodal axis is the axis of intersection between the orbit of the moon around the Earth and the orbit of Earth around the Sun. That intersection has a north and south, and those points are called nodes. So, the north node represents our destiny; or future, where we’re headed as humanity, what is our destination, what is our direction, where do we need to focus on. In the south, the south node represents our past; what we need to purge, what we need to cleanse, what we need to integrate, what we need to let go…”.
The first eclipse will be on April 30, but Arraut says we will feel it a lot sooner.
“We usually start feeling it around a month before the first eclipse takes place. So, this first eclipse that takes place, the 30th of April, brings many changes into our lives, since all eclipses are like catalysts that align us with our highest purpose. Eclipses literally will cleanse, detox, and be used as tools to show us what path we need to follow,” Arraut said.
Soon after the solar eclipse,we will see a lunar eclipse in May. How does this relate to the solar eclipse we just had?
