Divers scour Russian lake for meteorite fragments

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MOSCOW: Divers scoured the bottom of a Russian lake yesterday for fragments of a meteorite that plunged to Earth in a blinding fireball whose shockwaves injured 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes.

POINT OF IMPACT: A handout photo taken on Friday, and provided by Chelyabinsk region police department shows people standing near a six-metre hole in the ice of a frozen lake, reportedly the site of the meteor fall, outside the town of Chebakul in the Chelyabinsk region. — AFP photo

POINT OF IMPACT: A handout photo taken on Friday, and provided by Chelyabinsk region police department shows people standing near a six-metre hole in the ice of a frozen lake, reportedly the site of the meteor fall, outside the town of Chebakul in the Chelyabinsk region. — AFP photo

The 10-tonne meteor streaked across the sky in the Urals region on Friday morning just as the world braced for a close encounter with a large asteroid that left some Russian officials calling for the creation of a global system of space object defence.

The unpredicted meteor strike brought traffic to a halt in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk as residents poured out on the streets to watch the light show before hovering for safety as a sonic boom shattered glass and set off car alarms. The shattered glass injured most of the people.

“We have a special team working … that is now assessing the seismic stability of buildings,” Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov told residents as he inspected the damage in the central Russian city.

“We will be especially careful about switching the gas back on,” he said in televised remarks.

A fragment of the meteor – called a meteorite once it hits the ground – was believed to have plunged into the Chelyabinsk region’s frozen Lake Chebarkul.

“A group of six divers will inspect the waters for the presence of pieces of a meteorite,” an emergencies ministry spokeswoman told Russian news agencies moments before the start of the operation.

But Puchkov stressed that no fragments had been discovered anywhere in the region so far despite some 20,000 rescuers and recovery workers being dispatched to the region on Friday.

The meteor explosion appears to be one of the most stunning cosmic events above Russia since the 1908 Tunguska Event in which a massive blast most scientists blame on an asteroid or a comet ripped through Siberia.

Scientists at the US space agency Nasa estimated that the amount of energy released from impact with the atmosphere was about 30 times greater than the force of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.

“We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average,” said Paul Chodas of Nasa’s Near-Earth Object Program Office.

“When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones,” he said in a statement published on the Nasa website. — AFP