At least 1,200 hurt by meteor blast

2013-02-16 00:00:00


The scenes from Chelyabinsk, rocked by an intense shock wave when a meteor hit the Earth's atmosphere Friday morning, offer a glimpse of an apocalyptic scenario that many have walked through mentally, but has never before injured so many people.

Students at the institute crammed through a staircase blanketed with glass out to the street, where hundreds stood in awe, looking at the sky. The flash came in blinding white, so bright that the shadows of buildings slid swiftly and sickeningly across the ground. It burst yellow, then orange.

Around 1,200 people, 200 of them children, were injured, mostly by glass that exploded into schools and workplaces, the Interior Ministry said. Others suffered skull trauma and broken bones. A city administrator said more than 1 million square feet of glass shattered, leaving buildings exposed to the cold.


At 9 a.m., the sun had just risen on the Ural Mountains, which form a ridge between European Russia and Siberia to the east. The area around Chelyabinsk is a constellation of defense-manufacturing cities, some devoted to nuclear weapons. The factory towns are separated by great expanses of uninhabited forest.

Scientists believe the meteor exploded upon hitting the lower atmosphere and disintegrated at an altitude of about 20 to 30 miles above the Earth's surface.

It may have been made of iron, the Russian Academy of Sciences said, which allowed some small fragments, or meteorites, perhaps 5 percent of the meteor's mass, to reach the Earth's surface.

Peter G. Brown, a physics professor at the University of Western Ontario, said it probably weighed around 7,000 tons and the energy released was equivalent to 300 kilotons of TNT, making it the largest recorded since 1908 at Tunguska, Siberia.

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