Record meteorite hits Norway - Impact blast comparable to Hiroshima Aftenposten.no 09 Jun 2006 At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms and the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking several seconds to travel across the sky. A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic disturbances at 02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok. Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time. "I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash. "I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said. Astronomers were excited by the news. "There were ground tremors, a house shook and a curtain was blown into the house," Norway's best known astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten.no. Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms. "This is simply exceptional. I cannot imagine that we have had such a powerful meteorite impact in Norway in modern times. If the meteorite was as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb. Of course the meteorite is not radioactive, but in explosive force we may be able to compare it to the (atomic) bomb," Røed Ødegaard said. The astronomer believes the meteorite was a giant rock and probably the largest known to have struck Norway. "The record was the Alta meteorite that landed in 1904. That one was 90 kilos (198 lbs) but we think the meteorite that landed Wednesday was considerably larger," Røed Ødegaard said, and urged members of the public who saw the object or may have found remnants to contact the Institute of Astrophysics. Comment: Gosh, what a surprise! For more information on comets, meteors, and NEOs, check out: - The Signs Meteor Supplement - Independence Day by Laura Knight-Jadczyk - Cometary Showers, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? by Laura Knight-Jadczyk The Norway strike is especially interesting not only because of its sheer magnitude, but because it seems to have been a busy week for meteorites and fireballs...

Flashback: Fire in the sky: A bright fireball that blazed over the Northland on Friday night BY STEVE KUCHERA Duluth NEWS TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER 7 June 06 The mysterious light seen over the Northland on Friday night was an especially bright meteor seen in at least two states and Canada. "Anyone who saw it should count themselves as lucky -- they are probably not going to see another one like that in their lifetime," Scott Young said. Young is an astronomer and manager of the planetarium and science gallery at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. The museum is collecting reports of sightings of Friday's fireball, which traveled from south to north over the Northland about 11:35 p.m. Friday. "We have a couple hundred e-mails, and my receptionist is taking phone calls as quick as they come in," Young said. "I'm sure thousands of people saw it, because it went right over our cottage country area." Using information from witnesses and the mathematical process of triangulation, the museum hopes to determine the fireball's exact path. "That intersects the ground at some point, and that's where you go look for pieces," Young said. If the museum is able to triangulate the fireball's path, it will publish the results so residents can look for its remains. Young believes it likely that parts of the fireball survived their fiery plunge. "There was a sonic boom heard over the Lake of the Woods area, and that generally means that it has penetrated very low into the atmosphere," he said. "If it does that, then generally pieces can survive." According to NASA, as many as 4 billion meteors enter the Earth's atmosphere every day, many at speeds about 45 miles per second. Friction with the air causes them to glow. Most meteors are just specks of dust that burn up in a brilliant streak of light. Fireballs are different. They can weigh pounds -- large enough to illuminate a long path through the sky. Some fireballs, called bolides, explode with a loud, thunderous sound. Friday's fireball broke into several pieces, witnesses said. "It broke up into two pieces -- one big ball and one little ball," said Tim Leseman of Eveleth. Many people who saw Friday's fireball compared it to fireworks traveling horizontally rather than vertically. From any spot, it was visible for as long as 15 seconds. "Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been enough time for anyone to take a picture," Young said. The fireball was seen from places as far afield as Brandon, Manitoba (more than 100 miles west of Winnipeg), northwestern Lake of the Woods (where it appeared to pass directly overhead), Orr, Eveleth, Duluth, the Lake Mille Lacs area and Danbury, Wis. "Everyone generally thinks it was just over the trees or just over the hills, but when a meteor like this is actually visible, it's usually 20 to 40 kilometers (12 to 25 miles) above the Earth," Young said. "It's way, way up there." A meteor's chemical makeup and temperature determine what color its glow will be. Many witnesses described Friday's fireball as being green or bluish-green in color (common for a stony meteor), turning to red near the end of its flight. Chris Magney of Duluth saw the fireball as he walked in the University of Minnesota Duluth area. "I just looked up, and right there in front of me I saw what looked like a firework," he said. "It was giving off some kind of trail. It wasn't an evenly spaced trail. It was kind of sparking off parts. It looked to be kind of bluish-green." The fireball was larger than past meteors he's seen. "This was probably one-eighth or one-tenth the size of the moon -- much larger than any background star," he said. "Just because of the light intensity it must have been pretty hot, whatever it was. It was moving as fast as the shooting stars I've seen." He watched as it appeared to follow an arc, vanishing over the northwestern horizon. Leseman was letting his dog out when he happened to look up to the west as the fireball blazed past. It was in sight for perhaps 10 seconds. "It was the size of the moon and it was moving slowly from south to north," he said. "It was very bright with a long tail, and it looked like it was rolling as if it was burning up.... I got a huge chill watching it." STEVE KUCHERA can be reached at (218) 279-5503, toll free at (800) 456-8282, or by e-mail at skuchera@duluthnews.com.

Flashback: Witnesses to 'green fire' wanted By STAFF Tue, June 6, 2006 Manitoba Museum wants to hear from people who spotted "eerie green fire" in the sky late Friday. Resident astronomer Scott Young said the spectacle occurred about 11:30 p.m. when a small asteroid or chunk of comet burned up in the Earth's atmosphere, shattering into several pieces. A sonic boom could be heard in the Whiteshell area about five minutes later, meaning the object was "nice and low," Young said. He said it was visible from Winnipeg as far east as Lake of the Woods, and some pieces may have made it to the ground. Vaporizing materials in the object, which burned up at 4,000 C to 5,000 C, produced the green colour, Young said. Descriptions have him believing it was a large bolide, which is a bigger cousin of a meteor or shooting star. "This happens every day somewhere in the world," Young said. He wants to gather as many eyewitness accounts as he can to determine a flight path and find any fragments that may have made it to ground level. People can send an e-mail to skyinfo@manitobamuseum.ca or call 956-2830 to submit their sighting. You must include the time and date, your location when you saw the object, direction you were facing, the direction it was travelling (right to left, for example), and a description of the object and any sound it made.

Flashback: Fireball: Object in sky nets 100 calls By ADAM CLAYTON Winnipeg Sun The Manitoba Museum has been flooded with phone calls from people who spotted a strange object in the sky. Resident astronomer Scott Young said the museum has received at least 100 calls about an eerie green light that appeared in the sky on Friday night. Young believes the object was either a small asteroid or a chunk of comet that shattered into several pieces after burning up in the Earth's atmosphere. "The receptionist is doing nothing but answering calls and taking numbers right now and I think I'm up to 180 e-mails," he said. "Lots of people saw it." Eyewitnesses from Dryden to Brandon and as far south as Duluth, Minn., have reported seeing the object. EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS SOUGHT Ufology Research of Manitoba, a Winnipeg-based independent centre that collects data on Canadian UFO reports, is assisting the museum in gathering eyewitness accounts to determine the object's flight path. Spokesman Chris Rutkowski said he's received more than a dozen calls so far. "They all report seeing a brilliant blue or green light moving through the sky with a long tail," he said. "There may have been somebody who captured it on a cellphone camera." Young said the end point of the object's flight path is somewhere in northwestern Ontario. It's not known whether any pieces reached the ground. "The first step is to figure out the trajectory and where pieces might come down," he said. "If it's a reasonable place to go looking, then we'll look for pieces," he said. People can send an e-mail to skyinfo@manitobamuseum.ca or call 956-2830.

Flashback: BACK TO THE BUNKER: Bush Reich Going Into Hiding on June 19, Practice Run for WHAT? By William M. Arkin Washington Post June 4, 2006; Page B01 On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The exercise is the latest manifestation of an obsession with government survival that has been a hallmark of the Bush administration since 9/11, a focus of enormous and often absurd time, money and effort that has come to echo the worst follies of the Cold War. The vast secret operation has updated the duck-and-cover scenarios of the 1950s with state-of-the-art technology -- alerts and updates delivered by pager and PDA, wireless priority service, video teleconferencing, remote backups -- to ensure that "essential" government functions continue undisrupted should a terrorist's nuclear bomb go off in downtown Washington. But for all the BlackBerry culture, the outcome is still old-fashioned black and white: We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on alternate facilities, data warehouses and communications, yet no one can really foretell what would happen to the leadership and functioning of the federal government in a catastrophe. After 9/11, The Washington Post reported that President Bush had set up a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington on a rotating basis to ensure the continuity of national security. Since then, a program once focused on presidential succession and civilian control of U.S. nuclear weapons has been expanded to encompass the entire government. From the Department of Education to the Small Business Administration to the National Archives, every department and agency is now required to plan for continuity outside Washington. Yet according to scores of documents I've obtained and interviews with half a dozen sources, there's no greater confidence today that essential services would be maintained in a disaster. And no one really knows how an evacuation would even be physically possible. Moreover, since 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the definition of what constitutes an "essential" government function has been expanded so ridiculously beyond core national security functions -- do we really need patent and trademark processing in the middle of a nuclear holocaust? -- that the term has become meaningless. The intent of the government effort may be laudable, even necessary, but a hyper-centralized approach based on the Cold War model of evacuations and bunkering makes it practically worthless. That the continuity program is so poorly conceived, and poorly run, should come as no surprise. That's because the same Federal Emergency Management Agency that failed New Orleans after Katrina, an agency that a Senate investigating committee has pronounced "in shambles and beyond repair," is in charge of this enormous effort to plan for the U.S. government's survival. Continuity programs began in the early 1950s, when the threat of nuclear war moved the administration of President Harry S. Truman to begin planning for emergency government functions and civil defense. Evacuation bunkers were built, and an incredibly complex and secretive shadow government program was created. At its height, the grand era of continuity boasted the fully operational Mount Weather, a civilian bunker built along the crest of Virginia's Blue Ridge, to which most agency heads would evacuate; the Greenbrier hotel complex and bunker in West Virginia, where Congress would shelter; and Raven Rock, or Site R, a national security bunker bored into granite along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border near Camp David, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff would command a protracted nuclear war. Special communications networks were built, and evacuation and succession procedures were practiced continually. When the Soviet Union crumbled, the program became a Cold War curiosity: Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered Raven Rock into caretaker status in 1991. The Greenbrier bunker was shuttered and a 30-year-old special access program was declassified three years later. Then came the terrorist attacks of the mid-1990s and the looming Y2K rollover, and suddenly continuity wasn't only for nuclear war anymore. On Oct. 21, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 67, "Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations." No longer would only the very few elite leaders responsible for national security be covered. Instead, every single government department and agency was directed to see to it that they could resume critical functions within 12 hours of a warning, and keep their operations running at emergency facilities for up to 30 days. FEMA was put in charge of this broad new program. On 9/11, the program was put to the test -- and failed. Not on the national security side: Vice President Cheney and others in the national security leadership were smoothly whisked away from the capital following procedures overseen by the Pentagon and the White House Military Office. But like the mass of Washingtonians, officials from other agencies found themselves virtually on their own, unsure of where to go or what to do, or whom to contact for the answers. In the aftermath, the federal government was told to reinvigorate its continuity efforts. Bush approved lines of succession for civil agencies. Cabinet departments and agencies were assigned specific emergency responsibilities. FEMA issued new preparedness guidelines and oversaw training. A National Capital Region continuity working group established in 1999, comprising six White House groups, 15 departments and 61 agencies, met to coordinate. But all the frenetic activity did not produce a government prepared for the worst. A year after 9/11, and almost three years after the deadline set in Clinton's 1998 directive, the Government Accounting Office evaluated 38 agencies and found that not one had addressed all the issues it had been ordered to. A 2004 GAO audit of 34 government continuity-of-operations plans found total confusion on the question of essential functions. One unnamed organization listed 399 such functions. A department included providing "speeches and articles for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary" among its essential duties, while neglecting many of its central programs. The confusion and absurdity have continued, according to documents I've collected over the past few years. In June 2004, FEMA told federal agencies that essential services in a catastrophe would include not only such obvious ones as electric power generation and disaster relief but also patent and trademark processing, student aid and passport processing. A month earlier, FEMA had told states and local communities that library services should be counted as essential along with fire protection and law enforcement. None of this can be heartening to Americans who want to believe that in a crisis, their government can distinguish between what is truly essential and what isn't -- and provide it. Just two years ago, an exercise called Forward Challenge '04 pointed up the danger of making everyone and everything essential: Barely an hour after agencies were due to arrive at their relocation sites, the Office of Management and Budget asked the reconstituted government to identify emergency funding requirements. As one after-action report for the exercise later put it in a classic case of understatement: "It was not clear . . . whether this would be a realistic request at that stage of an emergency." This year's exercise, Forward Challenge '06, will be the third major interagency continuity exercise since 9/11. Larger than Forward Challenge '04 and the Pinnacle exercise held last year, it requires 31 departments and agencies (including FEMA) to relocate. Fifty to 60 are expected to take part. According to government sources, the exercise will test the newly created continuity of government alert conditions -- called COGCONs -- that emulate the DEFCONs of the national security community. Forward Challenge will begin with a series of alerts via BlackBerry and pager to key officials. It will test COGCON 1, the highest level of preparedness, in which each department and agency is required to have at least one person in its chain of command and sufficient staffing at alternate operating facilities to perform essential functions. Though key White House officials and military leadership would be relocated via the Pentagon's Joint Emergency Evacuation Program (JEEP), the civilians are on their own to make it to their designated evacuation points. But fear not: Each organization's COOP, or continuity of operations plan, details the best routes to the emergency locations. The plans even spell out what evacuees should take with them (recommended items: a combination lock, a flashlight, two towels and a small box of washing powder). Can such an exercise, announced well in advance, hope to re-create any of the tensions and fears of a real crisis? How do you simulate the experience of driving through blazing, radiated, panic-stricken streets to emergency bunker sites miles away? As the Energy Department stated in its review of Forward Challenge '04, "a method needs to be devised to realistically test the ability of . . . federal offices to relocate to their COOP sites using a scenario that simulates . . . the monumental challenges that would be involved in evacuating the city." With its new plans and procedures, Washington may think it has thought of everything to save itself. Forward Challenge will no doubt be deemed a success, and officials will pronounce the continuity-of-government project sound. There will be lessons to be learned that will justify more millions of dollars and more work in the infinite effort to guarantee order out of chaos. But the main defect -- a bunker mentality that considers too many people and too many jobs "essential" -- will remain unchallenged. warkin@igc.org William M. Arkin writes the Early Warning blog for washingtonpost.com and is the author of "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World" (Steerforth Press). Comment: Well, maybe they know something they aren't telling? Since the Norway blast hasn't received much press, perhaps there is a reason? Imagine how easy it would be to convince an uninformed populace struck by a meteorite that what really hit them was a nuke from, say, evil terrorists connected with Iran...