Meteor strike caught on tape

Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 2:11 am

A massive meteor struck Alberta in western Canada on November 20 (2008), sparking a flurry of calls to emergency services, and this time it was no hoax. A police patrol car captured the dramatic event on tape – as the police vehicle cruises down a street, the footage shows a small bright light appearing in the sky before hurtling towards the Earth, and seconds after disappearing in an explosion of light.

Astronomers stated that the meteor could probably weigh a few tonnes, they will now assess the tape and determine where the rock exactly fell. Though one video viewer had his own hypothesis, ‘Perhaps it was the toolbox dropped by the female astronaut recently,’ he said.

A huge meteor, between 12 and 30 miles in diameter, smashed into the Earth 3.5 billion years ago with the energy of 1 billion atomic bombs, vaporizing the surface where it struck and creating a tsunami more than half a mile high that raced around the world at 500 miles per hour.

This cataclysm is the earliest known meteor strike to hit the Earth, and one of at least four that have been identified in a geologically brief 300-million-year period. The strike is the subject of an article published in the current issue of the journal Science by LSU geologist Gary Byerly and others.

When the asteroid hit, it was vaporized by the extreme energy of the impact. Condensation of this vapor produced droplets of melt, called spherules, which dropped into the roiling sea over the next few days and were deposited in layers on the sea floor.

These massive, early impacts were similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago but these forceful impacts were hundreds to thousands of times more powerful. Probabilities for a similar impact today, are predicted to be about one such strike every 100 million years.

( This post is from an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by APakistanNews.Com.)

Meteor strike caught on tape

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