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Shock Wave of Fireball Meteor Rattles Siberia, Injuring 1,000 Shock Wave of Fireball Meteor Rattles Siberia, Injuring 1,000
(about 2 hours later)
MOSCOW — Debris from a meteor streaked through the sky with a blinding flash in western Siberia early Friday, creating a thunderous shock wave that damaged buildings across a vast territory. Russia’s Interior Ministry said about 1,200 people were injured, 200 of them children, mostly from shards of shattered glass. MOSCOW — Gym class came to a halt inside the Chelyabinsk Railway Institute, and students gathered around the window, gazing at the fat white contrail that arced its way across the morning sky. A missile? A comet? A few quiet moments passed. And then, with incredible force, the windows blew in.
Many of the injuries were reported in the city of Chelyabinsk, about 950 miles east of Moscow, in a region where there are many factories for defense, including nuclear weapons production. But there was no indication of damage that resulted in any radiation leaks, officials said. 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, and Hollywood has popularized, but scientists say has never before injured so many people.
The blast was caused by a 10-ton meteor, of a type known as a bolide, which created a powerful shock wave when it hit the Earth’s atmosphere, the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement. Scientists believe the bolide exploded and evaporated at a height of about 20 to 30 miles above the Earth’s surface, but that small fragments — meteorites — may have reached the ground, the statement said. Students at the institute crammed through a staircase thickly blanketed with glass and from there out to the street, where hundreds of people were standing in awe, looking at the sky. The flash had come in blinding white, so bright that the vivid shadows of buildings slid swiftly and sickeningly across the ground. The light burst yellow, then orange. And then there was the sound of frightened, confused people.
The governor of the Chelyabinsk district reported that material from the sky had fallen into a lake on the outskirts of a city about 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk. Officials told Russian news agencies that they had sent police officers there. Around 1,200 people, 200 of them children, were injured, mostly by glass that exploded into schools and workplaces, according to Russia’s Interior Ministry. Others suffered skull trauma and broken bones. No deaths were reported. A city administrator in Chelyabinsk said that more than a million square feet of glass had been shattered by the shock wave, leaving many buildings exposed to icy cold.
The meteor event came hours before a small asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, passed close to Earth on Friday, which NASA was tracking on its Web site. Aleksandr Y. Dudorov, a physicist at Chelyabinsk State University, said it was possible that the meteorite may have been flying alongside the asteroid. And as scientists tried to piece together the chain of events that led to Friday’s disaster — on the very day a small asteroid passed close to Earth — residents of Chelyabinsk were left to grapple with memories that seemed to belong in science fiction.
“What we witnessed today may have been the precursor of that asteroid,” said Mr. Dudorov in a telephone interview. “I opened the window from surprise — there was such heat coming in, as if it were summer in the yard, and then I watched as the flash flew by and turned into a dot somewhere over the forest,” wrote Darya Frenn, a blogger. “And in several seconds there was an explosion of such force that the window flew in along with its frame, the monitor fell, and everything that was on the desk.”
Others, however, disputed that view, saying there was almost certainly no connection. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, part of NASA, said in a statement posted earlier on its Web site that “preliminary information indicates that the fireball in Chelyabinsk, Russia, is not related to asteroid 2012 DA14, which is flying by Earth today.” “God forbid you should ever have to experience anything like this,” she wrote.
Prof. Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, told the BBC that 2012 Da14 approached Earth from the south, while the meteor struck the Earth’s atmosphere in the northern hemisphere, indicating that the objects were traveling in different directions. “This is literally a cosmic coincidence, although a spectacular one,” he said. At 9 a.m., the sun had just risen on the Ural Mountains, which form a ridge between European Russia and the vast stretch of Siberia to the east. The area around Chelyabinsk is a constellation of defense-manufacturing cities, including some devoted to developing and producing nuclear weapons. The factory towns are separated by great expanses of uninhabited forest.
Fiery meteors are not unusual, but they typically evaporate far above the Earth’s surface, the Russian Academy of Sciences said in its statement. This meteor was unusual because it was so hard, and may have been made of iron, the statement said. Nothing similar has been recorded on Russian territory since 2002. As residents of Chelyabinsk began their day on Friday, a 10-ton meteor around 10 feet in diameter was hurtling toward the earth at a speed of about 10 to 12 miles per second, experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences reported in a statement released Friday. 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 — not an especially unusual event, the statement said.
Video clips from Chelyabinsk showed an early morning sky illuminated by a brilliant flash, followed by the sound of breaking glass and multiple car alarms. Meteors typically cause sonic booms as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. On Friday, the force was powerful enough to shatter dishes and televisions in people’s homes. This meteor was unusual because its material was so hard — it may have been made of iron, the statement said — which allowed some small fragments, or meteorites, perhaps 5 percent of the meteor’s mass, to reach the Earth’s surface. Nothing similar has been recorded in Russian territory since 2002, the statement said.
“I saw a flash in the window, turned toward it and saw a burning cloud, which was surrounded by smoke and was going downward — it reminded me of what you see after an explosion,” said Maria Polyakova, 25, head of reception at the Park-City Hotel in Chelyabinsk. A video made outside a building in Chelyabinsk captured the astonished voices of people who were uncertain what it was they had just seen. Estimates of the meteor’s size varied considerably. Peter Brown, director of the Center for Planetary Science and Exploration at Canada’s Western University, said it was closer to 50 feet in diameter and probably weighed around 7,000 tons. He said the energy released by the explosion was equivalent to 300 kilotons of TNT, making it the largest recorded since the 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia, which is believed to have been caused by an asteroid.
“Maybe it was a rocket,” said one man, who rushed outside onto the street with his co-workers after hearing the blast far out of sight. A man named Artyom, who spoke to the Moscow FM radio station, said the explosion was enormous. Meteors typically cause sonic booms when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, and the one that occurred over Chelyabinsk was forceful enough to shatter dishes and televisions in people’s homes. Car alarms were triggered for miles around, and the roof of a zinc factory partially collapsed. Video clips, uploaded by the hundreds starting early Friday morning, showed ordinary mornings interrupted by a blinding flash and the sound of shattering glass.
“I was sitting at work and the windows lit up and it was as if the whole city was illuminated, and I looked out and saw a huge streak in the sky and it was like that for two or three minutes and then I heard these noises, like claps,” he said. “And then all the dogs started barking.” Maria Polyakova, 25, head of reception at the Park-City Hotel in Chelyabinsk, said it was the light that caught her eye.
He said the blast caused balconies to shake and windows to shatter. He said he did not believe it was a meteor. “We are waiting for a second piece, that is what people are talking about now,” the man said. “I saw a flash in the window, turned toward it and saw a burning cloud, which was surrounded by smoke and was going downward — it reminded me of what you see after an explosion,” she said. The blast that followed was forceful enough to shatter the heavy automatic glass doors on the hotel’s first floor, as well as many windows on the floor above, she said.
The object was visible from the city of Nizhniy Tagil, around 220 miles north of Chelyabinsk, where so many people called an emergency assistance number that it stopped working, the Novy Region news service reported. Valentina Nikolayeva, a teacher in Chelyabinsk, described it as “an unreal light” that filled all the classrooms on one side of School No. 15.
The government response on Friday was huge. Seven airplanes were deployed to search for places where meteorites might have fallen and more than 20,000 people dispatched to comb the area on foot, according to the Ministry of Emergency Situations. There were also 28 sites designated to monitor radiation. No unusual readings had been detected, the ministry reported. “It was a light which never happens in life, it happens probably only in the end of the world,” she said in a clip posted on a news portal, LifeNews.ru. She said she saw a vapor trail, like one that appears after an airplane, only dozens of times bigger. “The light was coming from there. Then the light went out and the trail began to change. The changes were taking place within it, like in the clouds, because of the wind. It began to shrink and then, a minute later, an explosion.”
The area around Chelyabinsk, just east of the Ural Mountains at the western edge of Siberia, is home to “dozens of defense factories, including nuclear factories and those involved in production of thermonuclear weapons,” said Vladimir Lipunov, an astrophysicist at the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute. “A shock wave,” she said. “It was not clear what it was but we were deafened at that moment. The window glass flew.”
“No one needs to be told what the Urals is,” Mr. Lipunov told the NTV television station. “A second hit in the same area is unlikely and everything could have been much, much worse.” The strange light had drawn many to the windows, the single most dangerous place to be. Tyoma Chebalkin, a student at Southern Urals State University, said that the shock wave traveled from the western side the city, and that anyone standing close to windows — security guards at their posts, for instance — was caught in a hail of broken glass.
Siberia stretches the length of Asia, and there is a history of meteor and asteroid showers there. In 1908 a powerful explosion was reported near the Tunguska River in central Siberia, its impact so great that an estimated 80 million trees were flattened over hundreds of square miles. Generations of scientists have studied that event, analyzing particles that were driven into the Earth’s surface as far away as the South Pole. An article published on the NASA Web site on June 30, 2008, the centennial of the Tunguska impact, said the object, weighing about 220 million pounds during its plunge, heated the surrounding air to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit and exploded in a fireball that released the energy equivalent of 185 Hiroshima atomic bombs. He spoke to Vozhd.info, an online news portal, four hours after the explosion, when cellphones, which had been knocked out, were still out of order. He said that traffic was at a standstill in the city center, and that everyone he could see was trying to place calls. He said he saw no signs of panic.
In the United States, NASA alluded to the Tunguska incident when it said that it was watching closely as the asteroid 2012 DA14, 150 feet in diameter, is expected to whiz past Earth on Friday at a distance of around 17,200 miles, the closest for many decades. In those strange hours, Ms. Frenn, the blogger, wrote down the thoughts that had raced through her mind — radiation, a plane crash, the beginning of a war — and noted that her extremities went numb while she was waiting to hear that the members of her family were unhurt.
In a statement on its Web site, NASA said Friday that there was no risk that 2012 DA14 would collide with Earth. But it would pass within “the belt of satellites in geostationary orbit, which is 22,200 miles above Earth’s surface.” When emergency officials announced that what had occurred was a meteor, what occurred to her was: It could happen again.
The asteroid passed Earth at 2:24 p.m. Eastern time, at an altitude of about 17,200 miles. “I am at home, whole and alive,” she wrote. “I have gathered together my documents and clothes. And a carrier for the cats. Just in case.”
Although the asteroid passed Earth safely, NASA said, “if another asteroid of a size similar to that of 2012 DA14 were to impact Earth, it would release approximately 2.5 megatons of energy in the atmosphere and would be expected to cause regional devastation.”

Viktor Klimenko contributed reporting from Moscow, Alan Cowell from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.

Viktor Klimenko contributed reporting from Moscow, Alan Cowell from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.