Fire in the SkyS


Meteor

Flashback SOTT Focus: What are they hiding? Flight 447 and Tunguska Type Events

[Note: We're rerunning this 2009 article (with 2013 update below) for consideration in light of the missing Malaysian Airliner.]

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Air France Flight 447 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared over the Mid-Atlantic (just north of the equator) at approximately 1.33UTC on June 1st 2009.

No mayday signal was received from the aircraft and almost two weeks later, aviation officials have yet to give a coherent explanation as to what could have caused the sudden demise of a high tech Airbus 330-200 passenger plane.

As usual, the media are missing (or concealing) some very obvious yet understandably disturbing data about the nature of the threats to life on planet earth, and as usual, it is left to Sott.net to spell out the details.

Meteor

Best of the Web: Did a meteor bring down Air France 447?

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© Unknown
Back in 1996, after the initially very mysterious explosion and crash of Flight 800 from JFK to Rome, there were numerous eyewitness accounts of a "streak in the sky" just before the crash. This led to the "missile theory" of the crash, which was eventually attributed to the explosion of the center fuel tank by the NTSB. But, also at the time, it was suggested that a meteor of sufficient size could have struck the plane, bringing it down.

Could a meteor have brought down Air France 447? Today we are starting to see reports that there actually may have been a meteor:
However, both pilots of an Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon sent a written report on the bright flash they said they saw to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority, the airline told CNN.

"Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds," the captain wrote.

Comment: Actually, SOTT called this one when it happened! The reader is invited to take a look at What are they hiding? Flight 447 and Tunguska Type Events, that clearly demonstrates the possibility of Flight 447 being hit by a meteorite or a shockwave from an exploding comet fragment.


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Ancient Scars

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© Tourism Western AustraliaThe Wolfe Creek crater in Western Australia.
Only recently has science recognised craters for what they really are: evidence of sudden impacts from long ago. Geologists Alex Bevan and Ken McNamara explore our rich heritage of fossil collisions.

Travelling south from Halls Creek in Western Australia, the hilly country of the southeastern Kimberley quickly gives way to the flat sand plains of the Great Sandy Desert.

Some 90 km south of Halls Creek, we see on the horizon a break in the monotony: an apparently flat-topped hill. In these endless plains, it is hard to judge the hill's height and distance, but after another 10 km we are almost there.

The fascinating story of the Wolfe Creek Crater begins to be revealed as we approach the slopes of the hill: the quartzite country rock becomes increasingly broken and disarranged. Rusty-red areas of iron oxide soils, which cap the quartzite, become increasingly fragmented.

Then, curious objects begin to appear. Close to the top of the hill, on its western slopes, rusty balls of rock lie scattered on the ground, sometimes fused into the laterite, and at other times lying loose.

Reaching the top of the hill, we gasp from something other than shortness of breath - for before us lies one of the most startling geological features in Australia: Wolfe Creek Crater.

Between 870 and 950 m in diameter, Wolfe Creek Crater is almost circular. Originally it would have been 120 m deep, but is now largely filled with sand and is only 25 m below the plains of sand.

There are thousands of circular structures on Earth's land surface, and many of these can be explained by the action of well-understood geological processes such as volcanism.

A number of these structures do not occur in volcanic terrains, nor are they associated with volcanic material. In the past, scientists described them as 'cryptovolcanic' or 'cryptoexplosion' structures, believing they were the result of explosive eruptive activity or that the cause of the explosion is unknown.

In the past 50 years, many features thought to be volcanic have now been shown to have an impact origin.

In 1965, researchers found 1,343 grams of iron meteorites some 3.9 km southwest of Wolfe Creek Crater, making it one of only five craters in Australia where meteorites have been found.

Meteorites only survive if the impact is small, producing a crater only a few hundreds of metres across. In larger impacts, the projectile is completely melted and vaporised. So, without the meteorite itself, what other than the circularity of such structures leads us to believe they were formed by impact?

The telltale evidence of a meteoritic origin falls into three main categories: structural, mineralogical and chemical. Geophysical surveys of many suspected impact structures show that they do not have deep-seated roots.

Meteor

Meteorite may have landed along Kootenay Lake

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© Courtesy College of the Rockies/Cranbrook Daily TownsmanA meteor that looked as big as the moon swooped over Cranbrook early Saturday. This photo shows the view through the College of the Rockies meteor camera. The image is taken through a fish-eye lens with the horizon shown as a rim around the edge of the circle.

A meteorite that flew over the Kootenays on Saturday morning was seen in Nelson and caught on video by a camera on the roof of the College of the Rockies in Cranbrook.

It lit up the night sky at 2:17 a.m., according to physics lab technician Rick Nowell.

"Appearing as a dim dot at first, high to the north, it rapidly grew into a big, white ball as big as the moon, with a tail behind it," he says.

Meteor

Canada: Huge Meteorite crosses Cranbrook Sky

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© College of the RockiesA meteor that looked as big as the moon swooped over Cranbrook early on Saturday morning. This photo shows the view through the College of the Rockies meteor camera. The image is taken through a fish-eye lens with the horizon shown as a rim around the edge of the circle. North is at the right of the image, west at the bottom, south to the left and east at the top.
Witnesses describe a fireball that looked as big as the moon.

An enormous meteor was caught on video as it flew over Cranbrook early on Saturday morning.

A video camera on the roof of the College of the Rockies caught the meteor's flight in a nine-second clip that you can view on the Townsman's Facebook page.

Physics lab technician Rick Nowell described the sky as the meteor passed over us.

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Best of the Web: If not by impact, then what?

One of the large regions that tweaks my curiosity about impact events in a very big way is an area that extends from eastern New Mexico to just the other side of Odessa, and Midland, Texas.

In the image below we see a small part of that area near Vaughn, New Mexico. Using Google Earth's historical image feature, we can view the same place from about 15,000 feet, in images taken at different times of the year.

Impact 1
© Unknown
As you can see, there are numerous craters. You get a different set of colors in the late summer.

Impact 2
© Unknown

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NASA says earth shattering boom just meteorite

With some predicting the end of the world next Saturday, residents of Virginia Beach could be forgiven for fearing the worst when they heard a loud boom on Tuesday night.

But according to NASA scientists, the earth shattering explosion was nothing more than a meteorite exploding as it entered the earth's atmosphere.

The incident, which was loud enough to rattle homes in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Suffolk and other areas prompted a flurry of calls to 911 from concerned residents.
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© Alamy

Speaking to WAVY-TV, NASA scientist Joe Zawodny said the boom is most consistent with the space rock and is probably associated with a meteor shower that peaked last week.

Mr Zawodny says an object as small as a golf ball could cause such a loud bang if it was travelling fast enough.

'A sonic boom is pressure wave, and it mimics an explosion.

'They can be quite forceful, and can definitely rattle walls and windows.'

Meteor

Stunning Video: Comet Collides With the Sun

Now That's a close encounter.
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© NASA/SOHONASA captured a stunning video showing this fairly bright white comet as it dove towards the Sun -- and was never heard from again.

NASA's solar observatory captured a stunning video of a comet streaking towards the sun between Tuesday and Wednesday -- and the aftermath when it collided with the tremendous ball of plasma.

The video, captured by NASA's Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), appears to show a fireball jet out following the collision. That's not quite what happened, NASA explained. Instead, a coronal mass ejection coincidentally blasted out to the right just as the comet approaches and is vaporized by the sun.

The comet is probably part of the Kreutz family -- remnants of a single giant comet that broke up many centuries ago, and crash against its surface from time to time. It was discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov, the space agency said.

In this coronagraph, an opaque disk blocks the glare of the sun like an artificial eclipse, revealing faint objects that no Earth-bound telescope could possibly see. It's intended to allow scientists to view the faint structures in the sun's corona -- but it also reveals sungrazing comets like this one.

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US, New Jersey: Mysterious Hole Appears in Ground in Bernards

Officials and experts in one New Jersey town are scratching their heads over a mysterious hole that appeared in a yard last week.

For now, it appears the small crater that splayed debris across a 100-foot area wasn't caused by a meteorite. Beyond that, it's a mystery.

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© AP/Bernards Police Dept.This photo provided by the Bernards Police Department shows a hole in the front yard of a home in the Basking Ridge section of the township.
"It's just really, really weird," said Jerry Vinski, director of nearby Raritan Valley Community College's planetarium, who conducted tests on the site. "We dug around and couldn't find anything. We used metal detectors because all meteors have metal in them, and we couldn't find anything, large or small."

Bernards Township Police Capt. Edward Byrnes said whatever hit the front yard in the Basking Ridge section left a crater about 18 inches deep and roughly the size of a coffee table. Rocks and soil were scattered around the yard and driveway.

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Croatia: Gardeners Comet Tale

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© Europics.at

A Romanian man planting potatoes almost died when a meteorite believed to be from the tale of Halley's Comet thudded into the ground inches from where he was working.

Dumitru Zvanca, 58, said: "I heard a brief whoosh of air and then something hit the ground just to one side of me with an enormous thud. I didn't see a meteor, but I saw the small crater of earth it made and whatever had hit the ground had sunk into the earth.

"I thought there might be more so I ran inside and waited until the next day - then I went out and dug it up."

The gardener from Suharau commune, in Botosani country in northern Romania contacted geologist Sorin Grindei, from Botosani, who said: "It had fallen 50-70 centimetres into the garden. It was like a black round ball, like a pool ball.