Ashburton was spared the sonic boom that was heard in greater Christchurch as the fireball plunged through the earth's atmosphere, but our skies appear to have been the playground in which the meteor flared its last.
Sightings have been reported to the Guardian from around the district and to a person, the meteor spotters are consistent in their recollection of the form the fireball took.

The sightings were all made just before 3pm.
Alford Forest man Nigel Birt said the object was 'big, bright and iridescent".

"It was streaking through the sky. It didn't have any real shape but had a tail flaring off the back. Two bits broke off and it just burned up and disappeared," he said.
The meteor was visible for just a few seconds and when it disappeared was heading in a north, north-east direction, Mr Birt said.

Just a few kilometres away at the Mayfield Golf Course, Paul Gardner saw a fiery object appear overhead. He shook his head and wondered if he was seeing things.

"It took about three seconds to cross the sky and was like a ball of orangey-blue fire with a tail."

Given the direction it was moving in and its speed of travel, Mr Gardner said it appeared to be heading towards Oxford.

He has absolutely no doubt that what he saw was a meteor.
"I knew as soon as I saw it that it wasn't a plane. I watched it and it just disappeared, it died. If this thing had been at night, it would have been incredible, spectacular," he said.

Real estate salesman Tony Sands was driving along Chalmers Avenue, his mind on an appointment with a Bridge Street home owner, when a bright light appeared in front of his car.

"It was about five to three and I saw this flash of light towards the top of my windscreen. It was there one minute and gone the next. It was travelling too fast to be a plane and was a yellowy, white light."

The object was moving towards Christchurch

"It was travelling inland at speed and it was very unusual because it wasn't high in the sky, I didn't have to crane my neck to see it through the windscreen," Mr Sands said.
The bright, travelling light had no apparent body shape and it flared at the back like a jet.

"I've never seen anything move so fast," he said.
And just down the road at the Ashburton Airfield, pilot Robin Corbett was out on the runway when he spotted the meteor.

"It was an awesome sight. I saw its full splurge of fire, but I didn't hear any sound. It was a broad band of light and as it got closer to the horizon it faded off and a few bits seemed to split away. It was an impressive sight," Mr Corbett said.

Like others who reported sightings of the meteor, Mr Corbett said the object was low in the sky and was heading in the direction of Hanmer.

September 13 2006

Another quake, with a magnitude of 4.6 was registered at 1:39 p.m. local time (2:39 a.m. GMT) in the Sea of Japan 125km (78 miles) to the northeast of the city of Nakhodka in the Primorye Territory, a spokesman for local emergency services said.

"A 4.6-magnitude earthquake occurred at a depth of the 450km (280 miles)," he said. "No tremors were felt in the territory's coastal regions. No casualties, destruction or threat of tsunamis have been reported."

Powerful quakes have hit Russia's Pacific for years. Over 2,000 people were killed when a devastating earthquake destroyed the town of Neftegorsk on the island of Sakhalin on May 28, 1995.

This year more than 1,200 people, including 542 children, were evacuated from the north of the Kamchatka peninsula after a series of major earthquakes. The first 7.8-magnitude quake, the strongest in the Koryak Autonomous Area since 1900, injured 31 people on April 21 and had an epicenter about 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the town of Khailino. It also damaged about 380 houses and 25 administrative facilities in four other towns.

The hurricane was moving out to sea and was no threat to land, according to the hurricane center. Gordon's clearly defined eye was centered about 550 miles east-southeast of Bermuda and moving north-northeast at near 13 mph. Some gradual weakening was expected over the next 24 hours, forecasters said.

"Although Gordon's eye remains distinct, it has become smaller and a little less well-defined," said Richard Knabb, a senior hurricane specialist.

Some waves could reach Bermuda, but the British territory should not feel tropical storm force winds, forecasters said.

The Atlantic hurricane season began June 1 and ends Nov. 30. The National Hurricane Center's latest forecast for the season expects between seven and nine hurricanes, a slight reduction from earlier predictions.

Federal scientists said Wednesday that the season hasn't been as busy because weak El Nino conditions have developed in the tropical Pacific.

El Nino means higher ocean temperatures that inhibit hurricanes by increasing crosswinds over the Caribbean. This vertical wind shear can rip storms apart or even stop them from forming. But National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists warned that the El Nino impacts on hurricanes have been small so far.

"We are still in the peak months of the Atlantic hurricane season, and conditions remain generally conducive for hurricane formation," said Gerry Bell, the agency's lead seasonal hurricane forecaster.

In that year El Nino brought drought to parts of Asia and Australia, and heavy rains and floods to Latin America.

Scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) say there has been drier-than-average weather in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines - countries which are often the first to show the effects of a new El Nino.

But the early indications are that weather changes will be milder than in some previous events.

"What happens is that the cool current over the eastern Pacific, which brings cold waters from the Antarctic, up the South American coast towards the equator - the Humboldt currrent - weakens, and this allows El Nino to develop off South America, and the temperatures rise quite considerably," commented Dr Harvey Sterne from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

"In some years we've had four or five degrees Celsius above normal; now, this year, they're about one or two degrees above normal, so it's nothing like we had in the early 1980s."

Noaa says this latest phenomenon may explain why this year's Atlantic hurricane season has so far been weaker than expected - winds associated with El Nino events disrupt and weaken storm formation.

The researchers are also predicting a milder-than-average winter for much of North America, and wetter weather for the US Gulf Coast and Florida.

Federal officials attributed the increase to two consecutive seasons of hot and dry weather that left forest and ranges parched and easily ignited by lightning.

Fifteen federal, state and local firefighters have died this year battling wildland fires, the center reported. The worst single accident this year was a helicopter crash Aug. 13 in Idaho that killed three firefighters and the pilot.

Rose Davis of the NIFC said the 2006 acreage was skewed by unusually large early season range fires in Texas and Oklahoma - blazes that burned mainly sparsely populated areas and did not lead to large numbers of deaths or heavy damage to homes.

The Interior Department and the U.S. Forest Service have spent about $1.25 billion fighting the fires since the fiscal 2006 year began last Oct. 1.

The wildfire season may almost be over. Cooler weather and upper-elevation snow are expected in the Northwest.

"It has never occurred before in the past," said NASA senior research scientist Josefino Comiso in a phone interview. "It is alarming... This winter ice provides the kind of evidence that it is indeed associated with the greenhouse effect."

Scientists have long worried about melting Arcticsea ice in the summer, but they had not seen a big winter drop in sea ice, even though they expected it.

For more than 25 years Arctic sea ice has slowly diminished in winter by about 1.5 percent per decade. But in the past two years the melting has occurred at rates 10 to 15 times faster. From 2004 to 2005, the amount of ice dropped 2.3 percent; and over the past year, it's declined by another 1.9 percent, according to Comiso.

A second NASA study by other researchers found the winter sea ice melt in one region of the eastern Arctic has shrunk about 40 percent in just the past two years. This is partly because of local weather but also partly because of global warming, Comiso said.

The loss of winter ice is bad news for the ocean because this type of ice, when it melts in summer, provides a crucial breeding ground for plankton, Comiso said. Plankton are the bottom rung of the ocean's food chain.

"If the winter ice melt continues, the effect would be very profound especially for marine mammals," Comiso said in a NASA telephone press conference.

The ice is melting even in subfreezing winter temperatures because the water is warmer and summer ice covers less area and is shorter-lived, Comiso said. Thus, the winter ice season shortens every year and warmer water melts at the edges of the winter ice more every year.

Scientists and climate models have long predicted a drop in winter sea ice, but it has been slow to happen. Global warming skeptics have pointed to the lack of ice melt as a flaw in global warming theory.

The latest findings are "coming more in line with what we expected to find," said Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "We're starting to see a much more coherent and firm picture occurring."

"I hate to say we told you so, but we told you so," he added.

Serreze said only five years ago he was "a fence-sitter" on the issue of whether man-made global warming was happening and a threat, but he said recent evidence in the Arctic has him convinced.

Summer sea ice also has dramatically melted and shrunk over the years, setting a record low last year. This year's measurements are not as bad, but will be close to the record, Serreze said.

Equally disturbing is a large mass of water - melted sea ice - in the interior of a giant patch of ice north of Alaska, Serreze said. It's called a polynya, and while those show up from time to time, this one is large - about the size of the state of Maryland - and in an unexpected place.

"I for one, after having studied this for 20 years, have never seen anything like this before," Serreze said.

The loss of summer sea ice is pushing polar bears more onto land in northern Canada and Alaska, making it seem like there are more polar bears when there are not, said NASA scientist Claire Parkinson, who studies the bears.

The polar bear population in the Hudson Bay area has dropped from 1,200 in 1989 to 950 in 2004 and the bears that are around are 22 percent smaller than they used to be, she said.