Meteor Explodes Over Atlantic With The Energy Of Atomic Bomb, And The World Doesn’t Even Flinch

If a meteor explodes over the Atlantic and no one sees it, did it really happen at all?

Everyone remembers the massive meteor explosion over the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013. But the meteor that fell over the Atlantic Ocean on Feb. 6 wasn’t seen or heard by a single human, or captured on video.

Instead, reports of the Atlantic meteor have come to us via the Fireball and Bolide Reports page of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program, Discovery News reported. It’s likely that because the impact took place over the ocean, the meteor was detected via a classified source, maybe the military.

The Atlantic meteor was first spotted by NASA’s Ron Baalke. Astronomer Phil Plait then looked into it and learned that the impact was from a space rock about 16- to 30-feet wide, Fox News added. The meteor that burst in the Siberian sky three years ago was 65 feet across.

Though much smaller than our last meteor strike, it did unleash quite a bit of energy — about 13 kilotons. According to Huffington Post UK, that’s about the same as 13,000 tons of TNT exploding, or the equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb.

But that’s considered small in the world of meteors. The Chelyabinsk explosion released 440 kiltons of energy, or the equivalent of 500,000 tons of TNT, The Telegraph added.

Pait said the space debris likely exploded over the ocean and was detected 19.2 miles over the South Atlantic, about 620 miles from the coast of Brazil. Though all of that sounds frightening, he said the Feb. 6 event wasn’t a big deal.

“Events this size aren’t too big a concern. Had it happened over a populated area, it would’ve rattled some windows and probably terrified a lot of people, but I don’t think it would’ve done any real damage.”

The meteor probably just burned up during its entry into our atmosphere, and its pieces fell in the ocean as small meteorites. Debris like this can speed towards Earth at 33,000 mph; the resulting heat causes them to compress and vaporize above the surface, which releases tons of energy. In Siberia three years ago, the explosion was the result of that energy release.

Though the impact of the Atlantic meteor was non-existent, the fact that NASA didn’t tell the world about it until much later has dominated headlines more than anything else. Some news outlets are even crying conspiracy.

HOW DID WE ALL MISS THIS? @Nasa: A meteor exploded above the Atlantic on Feb.6 and no one really noticed. #Fox35 pic.twitter.com/qgk3fH0WAf

— LuAnne Sorrell FOX 35 (@FOX35LuAnne) February 25, 2016

The fact is, space debris falls to Earth all the time. About 100 tons worth of space rocks collide with the planet every day, most of it no bigger than a grain of sand. We usually see them as meteors; the blaze of light is caused when the debris is incinerated in the atmosphere. Large pieces can explode and others hit as meteorites. They’re usually detected by seismic monitors, microphones, or satellite observations.

Most of these impacts occur over water; events like the one in Siberia happen once in a century.

Which means there’s no need to stock your apocalypse shelter. Though the Atlantic meteor caught the world by surprise, NASA knows where all of the space rocks that could pose a serious threat to Earth are located and assure that none of them are scheduled to hit us.

The Near Earth Object Program has said that all of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have a less than 0.01 percent change of collision with Earth in the next 100 years.

So have we just been lucky so far that a meteor, like the one that exploded over the Atlantic, hasn’t hit a populated area yet? Not really, said, Plait. The human race isn’t really a very big target, even though our planet seems overpopulated.

“The Earth is mostly water, and even where there’s land, it’s sparsely populated overall.”

[Photo By mmee/Shutterstock]