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Metropolitan Feofan Ashurkov {former Deputy Chairman of the DECR under HH… ruling bishop of Stavropol during the Beslan crisis… another important cleric the konvertsy don’t know about: editor} of Chelyabinsk and Zlatoust said in a statement released on Friday that a meteorite strike that injured hundreds of people in Chelyabinsk Oblast on Friday was “the Lord’s message to humanity. From the Scriptures, we know that the Lord often sends people signs and warnings via natural phenomenon. I think that not only for Ural residents, but for the whole of humanity, the meteorite is a reminder that we live in fragile and unpredictable world”. He called on people to support each other and pray to God in thanks for saving the world from a devastating disaster.
Hundreds of people sought medical aid after the meteorite hit Russia early on Friday. Shock waves from the meteorite as it passed through the atmosphere at supersonic speed affected thousands of buildings. Many local residents will have to patch up their broken windows, as temperatures will likely drop as low as -17 degrees (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the region overnight.
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Early Friday evening, the MVD said that some 1,000 people, including more than 200 children, were hurt because of falling meteorite fragments during the day, mostly in Chelyabinsk Oblast. However, figures on hospitalisation varied significantly, but most injuries seemed to be relatively light. The majority of those hurt suffered cuts from broken glass as the meteorite hit the Earth, smashing windows and causing damage to over 3,000 buildings. In the mid-afternoon, prior to flying to Chelyabinsk Oblast, EMERCOM Minister Vladimir Puchkov told President Putin that “more than 500 people asked for medical help; 112 people, including 80 children, were hospitalised”. At about the same time, the Health Ministry gave comparable figures for injuries, but not hospitalisations, saying some 525 people, including 82 children, were hurt in Chelyabinsk Oblast alone. However, the ministry’s figure for hospitalisations was 34 people, including 12 children. The Health Ministry said two of the injured were in serious condition. By late Friday afternoon, Chelyabinsk Oblast Governor Mikhail Yurevich said that the number of victims had gone up to 950, adding that two-thirds of the injuries were minor.
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People in Chelyabinsk, the region hardest hit by the meteorite strike that slammed Russia on Friday morning, have a tough-guy reputation, pumped up in recent years by a popular TV skit show. Twitter feeds in the hours following landfall kept up the image, but admitted some weaknesses too. Twitter user @ma1ice_ma1ice wrote an hour after the celestial body streaked the sky over Chelyabinsk, a city of 1.1 million in the southern Ural Mountains, “Everybody cleared out from our office except one dude. Asked why, he said, I need me some coffee first”. Such stories jostled for online space with messages full of words like “fear,” “panic” and “scared sh*tless,” as well as numerous other expletives, which also abounded in most eyewitness videos posted on YouTube.
User @DANISHPRINCIPLE wrote, “Blinding flash of light, then, a blast like we’re being bombed. Lord, surviving this is unreal. I thought a war’d begun”. Authorities reported no deaths due to the meteorite, but police said by early evening that nearly 1,000 people were hurt, the majority of them injured by glass shattered by the shock wave. @DashkaBulanova wrote, “Yes, I’m home, shaking all over. Horrible panic here, everybody’s leaving the city”. However, the panic was far from universal, @Nastyayas tweeted, “I was asleep, heard the blast, and went back to sleep”. The less-lucky user @R_T_S_ wrote, “That’s some original wake-up call right there, when your door gets blown away by the blast wave”. Some took it better than others did, @caxapoook reported, “We were dancing, suddenly a flash of light and a horrible blast, we run up on stage in a panic, and the teacher’s all calm, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a meteorite’”. Some were just puzzled, Twitter user @marchenkochk reported, “Me and Anya smoked up and then the blast hit. We were like, what the fuck, and didn’t understand a thing”.
The people of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city plagued by dismal environmental pollution and high crime rates, became Russia’s new stereotypical tough guys after a television skit show called Our Russia went viral in the mid-2000s… it extolled their numerous implausible virtues and over-the-top skills, not unlike the American “Chuck Norris facts” phenomenon, praising the hyper-tough action hero. A Russian meme claims, “Chelyabinsk people are so hardcore that…”. The variations are many, ranging from “Chelyabinsk postmen are so hardcore that they bite dogs in the arse” to “Chelyabinsk woodpeckers are so hardcore that they drilled two subway stations”. The meteorite predictably triggered a wave of new incarnations of the meme, like “Chelyabinsk rain is so hardcore it’s made of stone”. The meteorite strike also spawned a dozen Russian-language Twitter accounts of its own, all offering more lowbrow humour, with lines like, “Looking to meet earthlings. No Bruce Willises”… a reference to the Hollywood star’s crusade against space debris in Armageddon.
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As Russia assesses the damage from the meteorite shower that rained down on the central region of the country Friday, experts in the USA said that the fragments of space rock could bring a small fortune in hidden treasure to those quick enough to find and scoop them up. Joseph Gutheinz, a specialist on meteorites and a former senior special agent with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), said in an interview with RIA-Novosti, “A relatively small piece is worth maybe a few hundred dollars, but a large chunk can be up to 100,000 dollars (3.02 million Roubles. 74,900 Euros. 64,500 UK Pounds) or even more. We literally have meteor shows here in the USA on a regular basis”. As for the meteorite fragments that landed in central Russia on Friday morning injuring hundreds of people and damaging thousands of buildings, Gutheinz said, “I expect people to be out there with metal detectors all over the place. They might even come in from Moscow to search”.
The catch is to find the right chunk of rock. Size matters, but the value of a meteorite is also based on its rarity, where it came from, and what it’s made of. Chris Palma, a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University, said in an interview with RIA-Novosti, “The most common is called a stony-iron, and it’s made up of minerals that are pretty common on Earth, so a small piece might be worth 20 bucks. But the composition can tell you something about where it came from, so if it has a composition that suggests it likely came from Mars, the value goes through the roof”. One of the largest sales on record came from a four-pound (1.8-kilogram) moon rock called the Dar al Gani 1058, found in Libya in 1998, sold last year at an auction in the USA for 330,000 USD (10 million Roubles. 247,000 Euros. 213,000 UK Pounds). A 355-pound (161-kilogram) meteorite found in Argentina and believed to have come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter sold for 93,000 USD (2.8 million Roubles. 70,000 Euros. 60,000 UK Pounds) on eBay in 2006.
Gutheinz said that anyone who finds what they think is a meteorite should have it assessed by an expert, and, in order to sell it, they should first get a certificate that documents the authenticity, noting, “Most of the time, eBay would be a good place to sell, but if you have a large rock you’d want to go to an auction house, and they’re going to want to know where it was, and they would require independent analysis”. For rocks that are larger than a baseball, he added, “People find they get more money by carving it up and selling it in smaller pieces”. Palma said that meteorite fragments aren’t radioactive or dangerous, unless they’ve just landed, when they might be blistering hot.
The lucrative price for meteorites… and the fact that rocks collected from national parks and other public land in the USA are supposed to belong to the federal government… created a thriving black market worldwide. In 1998, as a special agent with NASA, Gutheinz led an undercover sting operation designed to catch people selling phony moon rocks. Instead, Operation Lunar Eclipse led him to a man who had a real moon rock and an asking price of 5 million USD (151 million Roubles. 3.75 million Euros. 3.25 million UK Pounds). He traced it to the Apollo 17 mission to the moon; it was a goodwill gift from then-US President Richard Nixon to Honduras. Eventually, the rock was given back to the government of Honduras.
Gutheinz said that before someone buys a meteorite, a geologist should make a very definitive assessment based on evidence of extreme heat, weight, composition, and other factors. In the USA, Gutheinz added, “Most meteorites are found in ploughed fields or desert environments, all across the farm belt and the prairies in ploughed land, and in Death Valley they’re found a lot because it’s dry, so you don’t have the decay factor, and they stand out against the background”. Palma said that there’s a simple test that’d give amateurs a quick clue to tell if an odd-looking rock is a valuable find from outer space, saying, “If you see a streak of light, and hear the sonic boom, it’s a good giveaway that it landed someplace close to you and it’s worth checking out. The first thing to do is check to see if it’s magnetic. It’s not a guarantee, but most of them are”.
Maria Young
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On Saturday, Chelyabinsk Oblast Governor Mikhail Yurevich dismissed rumours that locals broke windows themselves in the hope of getting meteorite-related insurance, saying, “It isn’t true… nothing like that happened. That information is a journalistic spoof. No one broke any glass on purpose”. A police source told RIA-Novosti on Friday that several instances had come to light of people in Chelyabinsk Oblast breaking their windows with a view to claiming compensation for damage caused by the meteorite’s powerful shockwave. Similar stories circulated widely in the Russian media after a meteorite slammed into central Russia on Friday, injuring over 1,000 people, and causing damages estimated by local officials at over 1 billion roubles (33.2 million USD. 24.9 million Euros. 21.4 million UK Pounds). On Saturday, Chelyabinsk Oblast EMERCOM reported that the incident damaged over 4,000 buildings, mostly apartment buildings, and that the shockwave broke 200,000 square kilometres (77,220 square miles) of glass.
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Officials said that a flaming meteorite streaked across the sky and slammed into central Russia on Friday with a massive boom that blew out windows and damaged thousands of buildings around the city of Chelyabinsk, injuring more than 1,000 people in the area. The rare and spectacular phenomenon sparked confusion and panic among residents of the region; but numerous witnesses captured it on video, which quickly spread to television and computer screens around the world. A local teacher in Chelyabinsk Oblast told RIA-Novosti, “Suddenly, it was very, very horribly bright. Not like the lights got turned on, but as if everything was illuminated with unusual white light”.
Police and other officials said that around 1,200 people had been hurt, including more than 200 children, mostly in Chelyabinsk Oblast in the Ural region. According to EMERCOM, by the end of the day, 50 people were in hospital with meteorite-related injuries. Earlier, authorities reported that at least two people were in “serious” condition. The majority of those hurt suffered cuts from broken glass, but Chelyabinsk Oblast Governor Mikhail Yurevich said that two-thirds of the injuries were very minor.
The blast was so powerful that 11 of the 45 infrasound stations of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO)’s network designed to track atomic blasts across the planet detected it. Bill Cooke, of the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said at a teleconference on Saturday (Moscow time) that the object that exploded above Chelyabinsk was, in fact, a “tiny asteroid” measuring about 15 metres (50 feet) in diameter, weighting 7,000 metric tons (7,716 US tons). According to Cooke, it entered the atmosphere at a shallow angle of about 20 degrees and exploded at the height of about 20-25 kilometres, generating an energy shockwave equal to about 300 kilotons of TNT, or 20 nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The atmosphere absorbed the vast majority of the energy. Later, as new information filtered in from monitoring stations around the world, NASA upped its estimates of the object’s power, mass, and size. An update posted on the NASA site estimates that it released 500 kilotons of energy, that it was 17 metres (56 feet) in diameter before entering the earth’s atmosphere, and that it had a mass of 10,000 tons (11,023 US tons)… making it 30 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
Speaking to journalists on Saturday, EMERCOM Minister Vladimir Puchkov commended the teams working on the ground in the areas affected, saying, “A great deal of work has already been done, and we’re now launching rebuilding work. Power, transport, and communications systems are all working normally”. He also praised Chelyabinsk residents for what he called their restraint, patience, and level-headedness. Also speaking on Saturday, Chelyabinsk Region Governor Mikhail Yurevich said that repair work was well underway; he said that the meteorite strike affected approximately 100,000 residents. Reportedly, background radiation levels remain unchanged. Both EMERCOM and Rosatom confirmed this; it was a concern because the area has a fair number of nuclear facilities.
Reports about whether this was one large meteorite or many smaller ones initially varied, but Roscosmos confirmed by early afternoon that the object was a single meteorite, a report given earlier by EMERCOM. Yelena Smirnykh, deputy head of the EMERCOM press office, said, “Verified information indicates that this was one meteorite, which burned up as it approached Earth and disintegrated into smaller pieces”. Roscosmos stated the meteorite had been moving at a speed of 30 kilometres per second (108,000 kph/18.6 miles per second/67,100 mph). Officials are trying to determine where the fragments landed. None were recovered as of Saturday morning. On Saturday, a spokesman for EMERCOM, Irina Rossius, said that a group of six divers is preparing to plunge into the Chebarkul Lake to search for meteorite fragments. The dive should last about four hours. Earlier in the day, emergency officials in neighbouring Kazakhstan said that they were searching for two unidentified objects that reportedly fell in Aktobe Oblast. However, as they found no meteorite fragments by Friday evening local time, it led to speculation that if meteor fragments had entered the Earth’s atmosphere over Central Asia, they vaporised before making impact.
NB:
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15/16 February 2013
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130215/179493189/Russian-Cleric-Meteorite-Was-Lords-Message.html
http://en.rian.ru/science/20130215/179498713/Meteorite-Tweets-Tough-Guys-Panic-Self-Medication.html
http://en.rian.ru/world/20130216/179501992/Meteorites-Could-be-Worth-Big-Bucks——–.html
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130216/179500225/Meteorite-Hits-Central-Russia-Hurting-Hundreds.html
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