MOSCOW (AP)
-- A meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over Russia's Ural
Mountains with the power of an atomic bomb Friday, its sonic blasts
shattering countless windows and injuring nearly 1,000 people.
The spectacle deeply frightened many Russians, with some elderly women declaring that the world was coming to an end.
The
meteor - estimated to be about 10 tons - entered the Earth's atmosphere
at a hypersonic speed of at least 54,000 kph (33,000 mph) and shattered
into pieces about 30-50 kilometers (18-32 miles) above the ground, the
Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
Amateur
video broadcast on Russian television showed an object speeding across
the sky about 9:20 a.m. local time, just after sunrise, leaving a thick
white contrail and an intense flash.
The
meteor released several kilotons of energy above the Chelyabinsk region,
the science academy said. The shock wave blew in an estimated 100,000
square meters (more than 1 million square feet) of glass, according to
city officials.
"There was panic. People had
no idea what was happening," said Sergey Hametov, a resident of
Chelyabinsk, a city of 1 million about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east
of Moscow.
"We saw a big burst of light, then
went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud, thundering
sound," he told The Associated Press by telephone.
The
meteor hit less than a day before Asteroid 2012DA14 is to make the
closest recorded pass of an asteroid to the Earth - about 17,150 miles
(28,000 kilometers). But the European Space Agency in a tweet said its
experts had determined there was no connection - just cosmic
coincidence.
The Interior Ministry said 985
people sought medical care after the shock wave and 44 of them were
hospitalized. Most of the injuries were caused by flying glass, it
said.
There was no immediate word on any deaths or anyone struck by space fragments.
Meteors
typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the atmosphere
because they are traveling so much faster than the speed of sound.
Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are extraordinarily
rare.
"I went to see what that flash in the
sky was about," recalled resident Marat Lobkovsky. "And then the window
glass shattered, bouncing back on me. My beard was cut open, but not
deep. They patched me up, it's OK now."
Another resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out that the world was ending.
Lessons
had just started at Chelyabinsk schools when the meteor exploded, and
officials said 204 schoolchildren were among those injured.
Yekaterina
Melikhova, a high school student whose nose was bloody and whose upper
lip was covered with a bandage, said she was in her geography class when
they saw a bright light outside.
"After the
flash, nothing happened for about three minutes. Then we rushed
outdoors. I was not alone, I was there with Katya. The door was made of
glass, a shock wave made it hit us," she said.
Russian
television ran footage of athletes at a city sports arena who were
showered by shards of glass from huge windows. Some of them were still
bleeding.
City officials said 3,000 buildings
in the city were damaged by the shock wave, including a zinc factory
where part of the roof collapsed.
The vast
implosion of glass windows exposed many residents to the bitter cold as
temperatures in the city hovered around minus 9 Celsius (15.8
Fahrenheit).
The regional governor immediately urged any workers who can pane windows to rush to the area to help out.
Some
fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Chebarkul, the
regional governor's office said, according to the ITAR-Tass.
A
six-meter-wide (20-foot-wide) crater was found in the same area, which
could come from space fragments striking the ground, the news agency
cited military spokesman Yaroslavl Roshchupkin as saying.
Small
pieces of space debris - usually parts of comets or asteroids - that
are on a collision course with the Earth are called meteoroids. They
become meteors when they enter the Earth's atmosphere. Most meteors burn
up in the atmosphere, but if they survive the frictional heating and
strike the surface of the Earth they are called meteorites.
The
site of Friday's spectacular show is about 5,000 kilometers (3,000
miles) west of Tunguska, which 1908 was the site of the largest recorded
explosion of a space object plunging to Earth. That blast, attributed
to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to have been
about 10 megatons; it leveled some 80 million trees.
Scientists
believe that a far larger meteorite strike on what today is Mexico's
Yucatan Peninsula may have been responsible for the extinction of the
dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. According to that theory, the
impact would have thrown up vast amounts of dust that blanketed the sky
for decades and altered the climate on Earth
The
panic and confusion that followed Friday's meteorite crash quickly gave
way to Chelyabinsk residents' entrepreneurial instincts. Several people
smashed in the windows of their houses in the hopes of pretending they
were broken by the meteorite and receiving compensation, RIA Novosti
news agency reported.
Other quickly took to the Internet and put what they said were meteorite fragments up for sale.
The
Russian-language hashtags for the meteorite shot into Twitter's top
trends, and the country's lively blogosphere quickly reacted with black
humor.
One of the most popular jokes was that
the meteorite was supposed to fall Dec. 21 last year - when many
believed the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world - but was
delivered late by Russia's notoriously inefficient postal service.
Others
joked that the meteorite was par for the course for Chelyabinsk, an
industrial town long held to be one of the world's most polluted areas.
The area around Chelyabinsk is also home to nuclear and chemical weapons
disposal facilities.
Vladimir Chuprov of
Greenpeace Russia noted that the area where the meteor exploded was 100
kilometers (60 miles) from the Mayak nuclear storage and disposal
facility, which holds dozens of tons of weapons-grade plutonium. He said
the Russian government has underestimated potential risks of the
region.
A chemical weapons disposal facility
at Shchuchye in the Chelyabinsk region contains some 6,000 tons (5,460
metric tons) of nerve agent including sarin and VX, accounting for about
14 percent of the chemical weapons that Russia is committed to destroy.
The dramatic events prompted an array of reactions from prominent Russians.
Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at an economic forum in the Siberian
city of Krasnoyarsk, said the meteor could be a symbol for the forum,
showing that "not only the economy is vulnerable, but the whole planet."
Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, a nationalist leader noted for vehement statements, said
"It's not meteors falling. It's the test of a new weapon by the
Americans," the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Deputy
Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for
leading world powers to develop a system to intercept objects falling
from space.
"At the moment, neither we nor the
Americans have such technologies" to shoot down meteors or asteroids,
he said, according to the Interfax news agency.
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