If you’re in touch with the NASA newsfeed, you may have recently read about the baffling event regarding the fireball that hit the Atlantic Ocean without anyone noticing. The report read a fair amount of scary sounding facts that only become even more frightening to think about once you realize that mankind was particularly lucky without even realizing it.
The event in question seems to have taken place on February 6th at 1:55 PM UTC; a rather quiet Saturday for anyone on the east coast of the United States and South America for sure. It would appear that at the same time that individuals were peacefully having their lunches, a meteor with roughly the same explosive power as a nuclear bomb descended from space, was set on fire by its travel through the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded right over the Atlantic Ocean.
Luckily, this occurred above the ocean and very far away from any sort of land, preventing the event from becoming catastrophic in any way for human settlements. Not to mention that thanks to the fact that it exploded before any collision, it did not end up affecting ocean currents or risking tidal waves.
Even so, scientists say that the fireball occurrence recorded on February 6th this year was hardly worrying even if it had exploded above a populated area. Astronomer Phil Plait reminded us of the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russian territory in 2013. The Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to have had the explosive power of 500,000 tons of TNT, while the one that dropped over the Atlantic Ocean only had the same potential as 13,000 tons of TNT.
Scientists say that had it exploded over a city such as New York, it would have surely rattled windows and scare the bejesus out of anyone who was there to see it leave a scorched trail in the sky before exploding, but not much else.
Plait also added that individuals are hardly aware of just how exposed the planet really is. The scientist stated that on average, about 100 tons of meteor debris fall onto the Earth on a daily basis. The reason behind that is the fact that most pieces of debris end up disintegrating during their fall through the atmosphere, reaching 10 to 100 kilometers per second.
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