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When a blazing fireball from space exploded over Earth on July 25, scientists captured the first-ever seismic recordings of a meteor impact on ice in Greenland.
At approximately 8 p.m. local time on that day, residents of the town of Qaanaaq on Greenland's northwestern coast reported seeing a bright light in the sky and feeling the ground shake as
a meteor combusted over the nearby Thule Air Base.
But the fleeting event was detected by more than just human observers, according to unpublished research presented Dec. 12 here at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Seismographic equipment, which had been installed near Qaanaaq just a few months earlier to monitor how ground shaking affected the ice, also recorded the fiery meteor blast. The Qaanaaq fireball provided scientists with the first evidence of how an icy environment - and, possibly, a distant ice-covered world - could respond to a meteor impact.
The first sign of the meteor was a brilliant flash in the sky over
Greenland; the meteor was at its brightest at an altitude of approximately 27 miles (43 kilometers) above the ground, and it was traveling at nearly 54,000 mph (87,000 km/h), according to the International Meteor Organization (IMO).
Comment: Most interesting. Here's video footage:
Note that the news presenter described the glowing trail it left behind as a 'noctilucent cloud'. She's right, kind of. This kind of trail is itself a relatively novel phenomenon. Both rocket trails from outgoing take-offs and meteor trails from incoming space debris leave such glowing trails down on a regular basis now.
That's why meteor/comet fragment trails are so easily (and happily) conflated with rocket launches, and why we have such a hard time telling them apart...
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