Russia Starts Cleaning Up After Meteor Strike

Chelyabinsk, Russia (CNN) -- A day after a spectacular meteor blast shook Russia's Urals region, the cleanup operation got under way Saturday in the hard-hit Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

Although some buildings were unscathed when sonic waves from the Friday morning explosion reverberated through the region, others lost some or most windows or had walls come tumbling down.

More than 1,000 people were injured, including more than 200 children, according to news reports. Many of them were hit by flying glass.

Most of those hurt were in the Chelyabinsk region; the majority of injuries are not thought to be serious.

However, one woman was flown to Moscow to be treated for a spinal injury resulting from the shock wave from the blast, state media reported. About 50 people were still hospitalized Saturday.

Altogether, more than 4,000 buildings, mostly apartment blocks, were damaged and 200,000 square meters (77,220 square miles) of glass were broken, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited the Chelyabinsk regional emergencies ministry as saying Saturday.

5 things to know about meteors and asteroids

Local officials have estimated the damage at more than 1 billion rubles (more than $33 million), RIA Novosti said. Chelyabinsk Gov. Mikhail Yurevich promised compensation to all those affected, the official Itar-Tass news agency said.

With temperatures dipping well below freezing at night, the need to fix windows left gaping by the blast is urgent.

The city of Chelyabinsk was functioning normally Saturday as the repair work began.

Workers swept up broken glass, boarded up holes and began fitting new panes of glass in some buildings.

"This is no exaggeration"

Residents told CNN of their shock as they saw, heard and felt the awesome blast, and the chaos and confusion they witnessed in the moments afterward, when no one knew what had happened.

Many were relieved nothing worse came to pass and believe the city had a lucky escape as fragments of the meteor came raining down.

Denis Kuznetsov, a 23-year-old historian from Chelyabinsk, told CNN via e-mail that he had heard and felt the shock wave despite being far from the center of the city.

At first there was a blinding flash lasting several seconds, which made him want to shut his eyes. The light shone "like 10 suns," he said. "This is no exaggeration."

Kuznetsov said he experienced what felt like "a push," as a sound wave passed through his body. "For some seconds I simply stood," amid the sound of breaking glass, he said.

After calming his parents, Kuznetsov tried to call friends, but all cellphone coverage was down. The Internet still worked, however, and he managed to reach a friend in the city center who told of emergency responders heading into the streets.

At first, confusion was widespread, he said, with many people believing the boom had to do with a satellite or plane. But within an hour or so, news broadcasts declared it was a meteorite.

"There was no panic. All behaved quietly," he said.

Schools and many offices closed. Kuznetsov monitored the news, as the reported number of victims "grew hour by hour," he said. "Thank God no one died."

Meteor tweets we wish we'd thought of

CNN iReporter Max Chuykov saw the meteor trail from the city of Yekaterinburg. He shared on Instagram that it was close to the ground.

Ekaterina Shlygina posted to CNN iReport and wrote on Instagram: "Upon Chelyabinsk a huge fireball has exploded. It wasn't an aircraft."

Notable Large Impacts Craters

• Acraman crater in South Australia (90 km diameter)
• Brent crater in northern Ontario (3.8 km diameter)
• Chesapeake Bay impact crater (90 km diameter)
• Chicxulub Crater off the coast of Yucatán (170 km diameter)
• Clearwater Lakes a double crater impact in Québec, Canada (26 km and 36 km in diameter)
• Lonar crater in India (1.83 km diameter)
• Manicouagan Reservoir in Québec, Canada (100 km diameter)
• Manson crater in Iowa (38 km crater is buried)
• Meteor Crater in Arizona, also known as Barringer Crater, the first confirmed terrestrial impact crater. (1.2 km diameter)
• Mjølnir impact crater in the Barents Sea (40 km diameter)
• Nördlinger Ries crater in Bavaria, Germany (25 km diameter)
• Popigai crater in Russia (100 km diameter)
• Siljan (lake) in Sweden, largest crater in Europe (52 km diameter)
• Sudbury Basin in Ontario, Canada (250 km diameter).
• Vredefort Crater in South Africa, the largest known impact crater on Earth (300 km diameter from an estimated 10 km wide meteorite).

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite

Notable Meteorites

• Allende, largest known carbonaceous chondrite (Chihuahua, Mexico, 1969).
• Allan Hills 81005 – First meteorite determined to be of lunar origin.
• Allan Hills 84001 – Mars meteorite that was claimed to prove the existence of life on Mars.
• The Bacubirito Meteorite (Meteroito de Bacubirito) – A meteorite estimated to weigh between 20 and 30 tons. It is on display at the Centro de Ciencias de Sinaloa in Culiacán,Sinaloa, Mexico.
• Canyon Diablo – Iron meteorite used by prehistoric Native Americans.
• Cape York – One of the largest meteorites in the world. A 34 ton fragment called "Ahnighito", is exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History; the largest meteorite on exhibit in any museum.
• Elbogen – The oldest recorded meteorite in the Czech Republic, also known as the "betwitched burgrave".
• Huckitta – The largest main mass Pallasite.
• Hoba – The largest known meteorite.
• Hrascina meteorite – Croatian meteorite first speculated as originating from outer space.
• Kaidun – Possibly from the martian moon Phobos.
• Murchison – A carbonaceous chondrite found to contain nucleobases – the building block of life.
• Nōgata – The oldest meteorite whose fall can be dated precisely (to May 19, 861, at Nōgata)
• Orgueil – Object of a hoax that involved adhering a seed to part of the meteorite.
• Sikhote-Alin – Massive iron meteorite impact event that occurred on February 12, 1947.
• Tucson Ring – Ring shaped meteorite, used by a blacksmith as a table, in Tucson AZ. Currently at the Smithsonian.
• Willamette – The largest meteorite ever found in the United States.
• The Peruvian meteorite event – On 15 September 2007, a stony meteorite that may have weighed as much as 4000 kilograms created a crater 13 meters in diameter near the village of Carancas, Peru.

Apart from meteorites fallen onto the Earth, "Heat Shield Rock" is a meteorite which was found on Mars, and two tiny fragments of asteroids were found among the samples collected on the Moon by Apollo 12 (1969) and Apollo 15 (1971) astronauts.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite

Meteorite Weathering

Most meteorites date from the oldest times in the solar system and are by far the oldest material available on our planet. However, despite their age, they are pretty vulnerable to terrestrial environment: water, salt, oxygen attack the meteorites as soon they reach the ground.

The terrestrial alteration of meteorites is called weathering. In order to quantify the degree of alteration that a meteorite experienced, several qualitative weathering indices have been applied to Antarctic and desertic samples.

The most known weathering scale, used for stone meteorites, ranges from W0 (pristine state) to W6 (heavy alteration).

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite

Meteorite Recovery (The American Southwest)

Beginning in the mid-1990s, amateur meteorite hunters began scouring the arid areas of the southwestern United States. To date, meteorites numbering possibly into the thousands have been recovered from the Mojave, Sonoran, Great Basin, and Chihuahuan Deserts, with many being recovered on dry lake beds. Significant finds include the Superior Valley 014 Acapulcoite, one of two of its type found within the United States as well as the Blue Eagle meteorite, the first Rumuruti-type chondrite yet found in the Americas. Perhaps the most notable find in recent years has been the Los Angeles meteorite, a martian meteorite that was reportedly found by Robert Verish. A number of finds from the American Southwest have yet to be formally submitted to the Meteorite Nomenclature Committee, as many finders think it is unwise to publicly state the coordinates of their discoveries for fear of confiscation by the federal government, and of 'poaching' by other hunters at known find sites. Several of the meteorites found recently are currently on display in the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.


Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite

Meteorite Recovery (Arabian Peninsula)

In 1999, meteorite hunters discovered that the desert in southern and central Oman were also favorable for the collection of many specimens. The gravel plains in the Dhofar and Al Wusta regions of Oman, south of the sandy deserts of the Rub' al Khali, had yielded about 5,000 meteorites as of mid-2009. Included among these are a large number of lunar and Martian meteorites, making Oman a particularly important area both for scientists and collectors. Early expeditions to Oman were mainly done by commercial meteorite dealers, however international teams of Omani and European scientists have also now collected specimens.

The recovery of meteorites from Oman is currently prohibited by national law, but a number of international hunters continue to remove specimens now deemed "national treasures." This new law provoked a small international incident, as its implementation actually preceded any public notification of such a law, resulting in the prolonged imprisonment of a large group of meteorite hunters primarily from Russia, but whose party also consisted of members from the U.S. as well as several other European countries.

The Black Stone in the wall of the Kaaba in Mecca is thought to be a meteorite by some secular historians, but there is little support for this in the scientific literature

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite

Meteorite Recovery (The Sahara and rising commercialization)

In 1986–87, a German team installing a network of seismic stations while prospecting for oil discovered about 65 meteorites on a flat, desert plain about 100 km southeast of Dirj (Daraj), Libya. A few years later, a desert enthusiast saw photographs of meteorites being recovered by scientists in Antarctica, and thought that he had seen similar occurrences in northern Africa. In 1989, he recovered about 100 meteorites from several distinct locations in Libya and Algeria. Over the next several years, he and others who followed found at least 400 more meteorites. The find locations were generally in regions known as regs or hamadas: flat, featureless areas covered only by small pebbles and minor amounts of sand. Dark-colored meteorites can be easily spotted in these places, where they have also been well-preserved due to the arid climate, and in the case of the Dal al Gani meteorite field, favorable geology consisting of basic rocks (clays, dolomites, and limestones) and lacking erosive quartz sand.

Although meteorites had been sold commercially and collected by hobbyists for many decades, up to the time of the Saharan finds of the late 1980s and early 1990s, most meteorites were deposited in or purchased by museums and similar institutions where they were exhibited and made available for scientific research. The sudden availability of large numbers of meteorites that could be found with relative ease in places that were readily accessible (especially compared to Antarctica), led to a rapid rise in commercial collection of meteorites. This process was accelerated when, in 1997, meteorites coming from both the Moon and Mars were found in Libya. By the late 1990s, private meteorite-collecting expeditions had been launched throughout the Sahara. Specimens of the meteorites recovered in this way are still deposited in research collections, but most of the material is sold to private collectors. These expeditions have now brought the total number of well-described meteorites found in Algeria and Libya to over 2000.

As word spread in Saharan countries about the growing profitability of the meteorite trade, meteorite markets came into existence, especially in Morocco, fed by nomads and local people who combed the deserts looking for specimens to sell. Many thousands of meteorites have been distributed in this way, most of which lack any information about how, when, or where they were discovered. These are the so-called "Northwest Africa" meteorites.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite