Meteorite over the Urals

Drivers in Russia frequently drive with dashboard cams as protection against insurance fraud; literally Russian pedestrians toss themselves into harms way by jumping onto moving vehicles in order to make a kopeck or two. Robert Krulwich explains that's why we have so many awesome videos of a meteorite streaking across the skies, shattering window glass in Western Siberia, in Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, injuring over 1,000 people on Friday, February 15 at 3:20 GMT.



And before you think it can't happen here, but that these things only land in Siberia, in places like Chelyabinsk or Tunguska [here's NASA's fix on this], think again. Parenthetically, there was no way I was going to do this post without mentioning the Tunguska Event.

On June 30, 1908, in a remote part of Russia, a fireball was seen streaking across the daytime sky. Within moments, something exploded in the atmosphere above Siberia’s Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia.

This event – now widely known as theTunguska event – is believed to have been caused by an incoming meteor or comet, which never actually struck Earth but instead exploded in the atmosphere, causing what is known as an air burst, three to six miles (5–10 kilometers) above Earth’s surface.

There's a lesson here, the earth abides, but it is not a stable platform. There's a huge meteorite crater in Winslow, Arizona.