NORWAY impacted by comet fragment 6/7 - LINK

[Clio]

Record meteorite hit Norway

As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact comparable

to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima

Afterposten, 9 June 2006

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1346411.ece

At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms and

the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking several

seconds to travel across the sky.

A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology

research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic disturbances at

02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok.

Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because

his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.

"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a

tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then

continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash.

"I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid

charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.

Astronomers were excited by the news.

"There were ground tremors, a house shook and a curtain was blown into the

house," Norway's best known astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told

Aftenposten.no.

Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred

kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite

hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.

"This is simply exceptional. I cannot imagine that we have had such a powerful

meteorite impact in Norway in modern times. If the meteorite was as large as it

seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb. Of course the

meteorite is not radioactive, but in explosive force we may be able to compare it

to the (atomic) bomb," Røed Ødegaard said.

The astronomer believes the meteorite was a giant rock and probably the largest

known to have struck Norway.

"The record was the Alta meteorite that landed in 1904. That one was 90 kilos

(198 lbs) but we think the meteorite that landed Wednesday was considerably

larger," Røed Ødegaard said, and urged members of the public who saw the object or

may have found remnants to contact the Institute of Astrophysics

Copyright 2006, Afterposten

[olger]

We missed it by five days..

gcw

[Clio]

Wow. They are calling for volunteers to help assess the site, and are saying the impactor was likely something that weighed one ton.

Interesting reading.

[Ron Lambert]

Apparently this meteorite struck the earth in an uninhabited area. When is something like this going to srike in a populated area? Seems like it's only a matter of time.