The people of Sylacauga were as agitated as bees. What did they see in the sky? Some claimed that it was lit up with a reddish light, like the one left behind by the Roman candle used in fireworks. Others saw a ball of fire, its trail resembling a giant, jagged arc. Still others swore that at 17.28 on 30 November 1954, they saw in a clear blue sky the white smoke that an aeroplane leaves behind. But they were all agreed on one thing: it was as if a bomb had exploded. The inhabitants of the quiet town in the south-east of the US state of Alabama looked on in amazement and agreed without saying a word that they had no idea what they had just witnessed.
Anne Hodges saw and heard nothing. A little ill and quite tired, she was dozing on the sofa of her living room in a rented house on the edge of the city. Suddenly, she was awakened by a noise and pain. “I think the chimney is collapsing,” she replied to her mother, still groggy from sleep, when she asked her what the hell had happened.
The two women sat helplessly on the sofa. They looked up at the ceiling. There was a hole in it. They looked around the living room. A standing radio, like a cabinet, had been knocked over. Their eyes landed on Anna. There was a large bruise on her left thigh and a smaller one on her left arm.
Confused, they saw a black stone in the middle of the living room. Only later were they told that it weighed almost four kilograms. They had never seen anything like it. The terrified mother called the fire brigade. A rock had just flown through the roof, she reported, injuring her daughter. The fireman immediately pinched her ears. Is this call related to the stories about the incredible scene in the sky with which the emergency number was bombarded by the townspeople?
Aerial attack
He informed the police and together they rushed to the scene. It was 1954. There was no internet, radio announcements were slow, news spread by word of mouth. Had a plane exploded in mid-air? Firefighters were already searching the nearby forest, but they saw no fire, no smoke, no wreckage.
Were they attacked by the Soviets? The Cold War was at its height, and with it a paranoia that spread from the ranks of government to the people. We have been hit by extraterrestrial beings, the people ranted. They were very popular at the time.
Anne Hodges thought of nothing but her foot hurting and her home full of strangers. Police and firefighters searched for an explanation of what had happened, but none was found.
Meanwhile, Julius Kempis McKinney, a black labourer in racially segregated Alabama, was returning from the woods with his mules Penny and Pearl. He kept to himself as much as he could and supported his family by chopping firewood. He was hurrying home along a woodland trail with a full wagon when his two mules suddenly stopped. No matter how hard he pounded on them, they stood still and refused to move.
He got down from the cart and saw a black stone in the middle of the road. He had never seen anything like it. He poked it with his stick. Nothing happened, but he pushed it to the side, his two mules out of the way. Miraculously, Penny and Pearl relaxed, moved on and headed home.
In the evening, McKinney and his family listened to the radio. They excitedly reported that Anne Hodges had been hit by a meteorite, after they had got to the bottom of the matter. Police officers confiscated the unidentified flying object and, at the mayor’s request, took it to geologists who happened to be exploring the ground at the nearby lake at the time. It was a meteorite, the experts concluded after a closer look at the rock, and the police returned it to Anne.
She was pretty much at her wit’s end at that point. She was lying in bed with a sore thigh, while a crowd of people came rushing through the house. Her husband Eugene was not around. He was working. At the end of the day, he was returning from the field and met an acquaintance on the road. He called out to him through an open car window that something had fallen into his house and injured Anne.
He went home. The road to the town was almost empty, and he passed through it in a column. He couldn’t understand why all of a sudden all the people were in their cars and on the very road leading to his house. He could hardly get to it, the metal was almost standing still.
A queue was also forming outside his door. The townspeople, wanting to see for themselves that something really had come down from the sky, entered through the front door, looked around the house and exited through the back door, so as not to crowd with the newcomers.
Someone told Eugene to stand at the end of the queue as he made his way to the front door. He moved it on his own accord and went to his wife, who had been lying helpless in bed all this time. With her and many others, he was greeted by the news that Anne had become the first person in history to be hit by a meteorite.
Meanwhile, darkness also covered the miserable house of McKinney, the forester. The children were lost in sleep, and he had stolen out of the house. He regained his mule and returned to the spot where he had seen the mysterious stone. When he heard the description of the rock that had hit Anne on the radio, he was convinced that he had also encountered a meteorite.
He found it, quickly wrapped it in paper so that no one would notice, and hid it under his bed for hours at home. He did not tell anyone about his find. A black forester in Alabama in 1954 had no rights. He knew his find would be taken from him as soon as he found out about it, but he held his tongue. He confided only in his postman and together they waited for events to unfold.
Whose meteorite is it?
The Smithsonian Institution, which since 1846 has brought together museums, research centres and a zoo under its umbrella, was interested in the meteorite that hit Anne, but Eugene and Anne were unable to sell it. Firstly, because they didn’t own it. In a period of general paranoia about known and unknown enemies, it was confiscated by the government. Could it not, after all, be the remnant of a spy satellite, or even of some new means of warfare that the Soviets might have developed?
Anne was shocked to death when what God had sent her from heaven was taken from her, but she could not fight the government. She and her husband were able to fight the owner of their house, Birdie Guy, when government experts confirmed that she had been hit by a meteorite and returned it to her.
The Smithsonian offered them a modest ransom, but Birdie intervened, claiming that the meteorite belonged to her because it had flown into her house. Eugene and Anne fiercely resisted. By then, they knew that the black McKinney had made good use of his find.
His postman helped him find a lawyer, who negotiated a deal with a buyer who was willing to buy the meteorite for the Smithsonian. McKinney never revealed how much he got for it, but suddenly he owned a new house and a car.
Eugene and Anne refused the Smithsonian. They had hoped for a better offer, because the 34-year-old and somewhat buxom Anne was now a star, notorious and at her wit’s end. She was in all the newspapers and made guest appearances on TV shows.
Not long after she was hit by the meteorite, chaos reigned so much that her doctor had to admit her to hospital to keep her calm, even though he himself was disturbed afterwards. When a Life magazine photographer burst into the room and asked where Anne had been hit by the meteorite, the doctor calmly turned the show down, lifted up her hospital nightdress and, without her permission, exposed the wound, so that within days she was seen by readers all over America.
Anne was increasingly down on her luck, and her husband Eugene saw her accident as an opportunity to improve their financial situation. He and his lawyer set out to fight his landlady, Birdie Guy. Her lawyer interpreted the law to mean that whatever God sends is the property of the owner of the immovable. Anne claimed that the black rock was hers because it hit her. Eugene was happy to oblige her, but the judge was not.
So they litigated for a year or so, each with their allies on their side. Public opinion was on the side of the Hodges, the law on the side of Birdie Guy. In the end, they settled out of court: the Hodgeses paid the Guys $500 in damages then, or $4 600 today, and started selling their prized possessions. But their five minutes of fame are long gone. Almost a year has passed since the meteorite hit the Earth. Nobody cared anymore.
They once turned down an offer from the Smithsonian, but now they have received no other. Finally, a representative of the Alabama Museum visited them. Anne simply gave him the meteorite that turned her life upside down. Shortly afterwards, she suffered a nervous breakdown and then went through a divorce. She died of kidney failure in a nursing home aged just 52. She wished that the meteorite had not hit her. That she had not been the only person in the world who we know of who was unlucky enough to be found by a piece of rock from outer space.
The start of a nuclear war?
But what are the chances of being hit by a meteorite? “You’re more likely to be hit by a tornado, lightning and a hurricane at the same time,” says astronomer Michael Reynolds, without going into endless numbers showing how almost impossible it is to be a meteorite victim. Not that meteorites don’t fall to Earth. They often fall from the sky, except that most of them land in remote places or in the ocean, although the Hodges meteorite is not the only one that has chosen to land near people.
On 15 February 2013, at around 21:20, the residents of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk were shocked by what appeared to be a bomb explosion. People looked up and were amazed. Something round was hurtling towards them from the sky at an incredible speed. It glittered. Scientists later said it was 30 times more brilliant than the sun, so it’s not surprising that random passers-by gazing into the air suffered burns to their skin and retinas.
For example, in Korkino, a town 18 kilometres from the brightest point, radioactive radiation completely destroyed the skin on the face. But he could not look away. What was happening in the sky was too incredible.
“I was in my office when I suddenly saw a brilliant flash in the window in front of me. I smelled smoke. I looked out of the window and saw a giant smoke trail, similar to that left by an aeroplane, but many times bigger. A few minutes later, the window suddenly opened. There was an explosion, followed by several smaller ones,” recalled one resident of Chelyabinsk, then home to around 46 000 people, of that incredible day.
In a neighbouring town, a local man was just driving down the road. “It was quite dark, but suddenly it was as clear as day. I felt as if I had been blinded by headlights”, he reported what it was like to see what had flown over the Urals towards Chelyabinsk and landed a kilometre away, in Lake Chebarkusskoye.
He too heard the deafening bang of the explosion, as did the citizens of six other nearby towns, except that he did not fall to the ground like so many other people. The windows suddenly shattered. Pieces of glass flew around, crashing into everything in their path. It was later found that windows had broken in more than 3,600 blocks of flats.
Window frames and doors were also blown off in some places. In the town of Yemanzhelinsk, some 45 kilometres from Chelyabinsk, a window frame hit a statue of Pushkin so hard that it burst. The roof of one factory collapsed.
Even though the meteorite did not land in the city, many people were injured. Some were injured by falling objects, others by flying glass. In the end, as many as 1491 people sought medical attention. It is not known how many people had their wounds treated at home, but it is confirmed that never in history have so many people been injured by a meteorite.
Scientists have done the math. This time, they had a range of satellite images and amateur photographs, as well as video footage from locals and surveillance cameras. They combined this data with scientific data to calculate the path the meteoroid took to enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
A meteoroid is an object orbiting in interplanetary space, but as defined by the International Astronomical Union, it is much smaller than an asteroid, but larger than an atom and a molecule. A meteorite is the part of a meteoroid or asteroid that survives the journey through our atmosphere and lands on Earth without disintegrating or being destroyed along the way.
The “Russian” meteoroid entered our atmosphere at 10 to 20 times the speed of sound. The impact of the meteoroid entering our atomisphere was similar to hitting a brick wall, and friction occurred on its surface. Three quarters of its surface was heated. The extreme temperatures caused most of it to evaporate, leaving only about 0.05 per cent of the original meteoroid.
It exploded about 20 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, releasing about 500 kilotons of energy – about 30 times more energy than was released when the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. The resulting shock wave was so powerful that even places 120 kilometres away were affected.
Before the explosion, the meteorite was about 17 metres in size and weighed about 10,000 tonnes. When residents saw it travel north-south and then heard the bang, their first thought was that a nuclear war had started. It didn’t, but about 5 tonnes of meteoritic material ended up on Earth as thousands of tiny particles flew across the region, some of them reportedly landing in western Siberia.
One of the largest pieces, weighing around 650 kilograms, found its home at the bottom of Lake Chebarkul after breaking through a 70 centimetre thick layer of ice and making a 7 metre hole in it. It was recovered from the lake bed eight months later. Divers wrapped it with ropes, but when it was pulled ashore, it broke into three pieces. Because of this, they were unable to calculate exactly how much the meteorite weighed before it disintegrated, but they agreed that it must have weighed some 650 kilograms.
Not for the first time, not for the last
Scientists figured it all out pretty quickly, but to this day it’s still not clear where the Chelyabinsk meteoroid came from. That day, everyone was staring at the sky, or rather, at their observing devices. They were expecting a visitor from outer space, but they were all eagerly watching for the asteroid Duende, which came closest to Earth at a distance of 27,700 kilometres.
By coincidence, the meteoroid Chelyabinsk and the asteroid Duende were in our vicinity at the same time. But was it really a coincidence, or could the meteoroid have been a broken-off part of the asteroid? It was huge, around 45 metres in size, and one of the largest asteroids ever to come close to Earth, and certainly the closest of all.
It missed us in 2013, and there is reportedly an extremely low chance of it hitting us in 2080, although NASA experts assure us that a collision between the Earth and an asteroid of this size is expected on average every 1,200 years.
But if a close encounter were to occur, the collision would release as much energy as if several megatons of TNT exploded at the same time. The Earth’s surface would be partially destroyed, as happened in Siberia in 1908 when an asteroid or comet landed in the Tunguska River.
The explosion on landing was reportedly 1 000 times more powerful than the one experienced by the people of Hiroshima. It destroyed some 80 million trees over 5180 square kilometres of land and, if the ground shaking had been measured, would have reportedly produced an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale.
If an asteroid about one kilometre large landed on Earth, the climate would temporarily change, and if it hit a populated area, millions would die. But near Chelyabinsk, “only” a meteorite landed. Could it have been a piece of something else that travelled with the asteroid Duende? When scientists analysed the paths of the two, they found that they had nothing in common, and even if it was unusual, it was just a coincidence that they ended up near Earth at the same time.
But then where did the Chelyabinsk meteoroid come from? First an asteroid was suspected of being the “father”, but it was found not to be the right one, then other asteroids were checked for “paternity”, but no connection was found.
So the consensus now is that we have witnessed an extremely rare event, and that a meteorite this big only lands on Earth a few times a century, and only once every 10,000 years so close to a populated place.
Iron, silicates, stone
The meteorite that excited the citizens of Chelyabinsk was very rich in iron. Iron meteorites are mainly made of iron and nickel, and are divided according to how much iron and how much nickel they contain. In principle, they are the most interesting of all the meteorites, because when they are eaten with acid, some of them show incredible patterns on their surface, the likes of which cannot be seen in terrestrial iron.
Of all the meteorites that fall to Earth, only about 5% are iron meteorites. Most, around 94%, are rocky. These are more or less made up of silicates, 75 to 90 per cent of them, and most of them also have traces of iron and nickel. This group also has subgroups, as meteorites are divided according to whether or not they also contain millimetre-sized round crystals. Rocky meteorites include, for example, those rare rocks that probably came from the Moon or Mars.
Rock iron meteorites are the third smallest group of meteorites. Only one per cent of them land on Earth. They are made of a small, uniform mixture of silicates and iron and nickel, and are divided according to whether they contain more silicates or iron and nickel.
So only 5% of iron meteorites reach the Earth, but the public perception is that most of them do, because these meteorites are the closest to what we think of when we talk about them.
If a person finds a meteorite after seeing it in the air, experts say it has fallen. But when they just see it on the ground, without seeing it fall, they say they have found it.
There is reportedly more gold in the world – around 2000 tonnes – than there are meteorites in all the world’s museums, private collections and universities, even though between 20,000 and 100,000 tonnes of meteorites are thought to enter the Earth’s atmosphere every year.
Most of it burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere, turns into atmospheric dust, lands in uninhabited places or hides in the oceans because our planet is 71% water. Of this, 96.5 per cent is salt water and only 3.5 per cent is fresh water, frozen in glaciers and at the poles. In fact, ice accounts for 69 per cent of freshwater. If the Earth’s surface were flat and all the ice melted, sea levels would rise by 2.7 kilometres.
But there is also fresh water, which is below the Earth’s surface. If you were to add up all the fresh water the Earth can produce, there would be enough for about 1386 million cubic metres, but rivers, lakes and springs only produce about 10.6 million cubic metres of fresh water, or just over 0.7 per cent of all fresh water.
So it’s not surprising that meteorites can “hide” in water or on land that is uninhabited, but many are found. For example, the famous iron meteorites, collectively known as Canyon Diablo, or Canyon of the Fears, are the remnants of an iron asteroid that visited us 50 000 years ago and blew itself to pieces. The largest of them, weighing 639 kilogrammes, is on display at the centre at the edge of Barringer Crater, 4.8 kilometres from the Canyon of the Dragonfly.
Researchers have been collecting meteorite chunks from this asteroid since the mid-19th century, and at the end of that century, they began to argue about whether the crater was volcanic in origin, or whether it was actually created by a fallen asteroid. Daniel Barringer was the first to identify the crater in the desert of northern Arizona as meteoritic in origin, hence its name, but it was Eugene Shoemaker who silenced his opponents in the 1950s after studying the crater, now privately owned by the Barringer family, for his PhD.
It claims to be the best-preserved meteorite crater on Earth. Because such craters are subject to erosion, few are visible. However, Barringer Crater is not a national monument. To become one, it would have to pass into state hands, but since it is in private hands, it is “only” a national natural landmark, some 1 200 metres across and 170 metres deep. The ring that surrounds it rises 45 metres high, although 50 000 years ago it was supposedly some 15 or 20 metres higher.
Barringer Crater has been the subject of much scientific attention, as was the meteorite that exploded over Russia three years ago. “If man is not to die out like the dinosaurs, we must study events like this down to the last detail,” said one scientist. But how did the dinosaurs become extinct in the first place?
How to fight the threat of asteroids?
The story goes that they were killed directly or indirectly by an asteroid. It was 65 million years ago when a giant rock 10 to 15 kilometres across came crashing down on Earth. It flew through our atmosphere for a short distance and eventually landed on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The impact reportedly released enough energy to yield 100 billion tonnes of TNT, or one billion tonnes more energy than was released when the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Naturally, the asteroid killed all those in its path and started fires that spread across the planet, killing even more who had initially escaped death. But then, like a deadly shroud, the dust descended over the earth and smothered all those who survived the first massacre.
The dinosaurs and other -saurs that ruled the earth for 160 million years exhaled in a matter of days or weeks, and the tiny creatures that survived were those that could adapt more easily to their new living conditions, burrow underground or hide underwater, according to a well-known story.
But the dinosaurs survived the catastrophe, palaeontologists say today. Almost overnight, only the ones that walked on the ground disappeared, while the flying ones were wiped off the list of animals in the millennia to come.
Mammals were similarly affected by the catastrophe, with only around 20% of all species seeming to have survived, but new mammal species have evolved from these and flourished in the same place where the dinosaurs would have killed them off.
Snakes and lizards also fared badly. Reportedly, 83% of all their species are now extinct. The surviving species were reportedly smaller and spread over a wider area, making them better able to cope with the ecological disaster.
Asteroid attack
But how do scientists even know that an asteroid hit the Earth at that time? Asteroids and other extraterrestrial objects are rich in iridium, while this chemical element is scarce on Earth. But even though large amounts of iridium have been measured in the Earth’s layers from that period, it is not clear how the close encounter of an asteroid with the Earth affected life afterwards. Why did some species survive and others did not? Why did some survive the impact but not the subsequent millennia of evolution? What caused the plague on Earth?
One part of the research community continues to insist that an asteroid is the main suspect, while others put volcanoes on the side. The asteroid’s impact on the Earth’s surface is believed to have triggered an earthquake measuring 9.0 or more on the Richter scale, resulting in violent volcanic eruptions, landslides and tsunamis across the planet and underwater.
Other researchers say the asteroid played no role in the extinction, while others say it was caused by a combination of an asteroid impact, a drop in water levels due to climate change that altered aquatic life, and extreme volcanic activity. This is thought to have lasted 800,000 years, accumulating so much dust and fine particles in the air that they blocked out the sun. Plants could not survive in the dark, but the food chain changed and the end was inevitable, and in between there was probably a “post-impact winter” when temperatures dropped because of the asteroid.
But it’s still not entirely clear why some species died out and others didn’t, and it seems that it’s not all the asteroid’s fault. Could it surprise us again? Of course, although today we have a network of observers monitoring possible hazardous objects in our vicinity. For example, there is the US space agency Near Earth Objects (Neo or Near Earth Objects), which conducts and funds research, studies and monitoring of asteroids and comets that occasionally come close to our planet.
In 1998, NASA started recording space objects larger than one kilometre, and in 2005 it set a target to inventory 90% of all objects larger than 140 metres by 2020.
But how will we fight the threat of an asteroid? One option is to emulate Bruce Willis from Armageddon. We will launch nuclear weapons at or below the surface. This should, in theory, make the asteroid smaller as we bounce a large chunk off it, and perhaps change its direction so that it no longer threatens Earth. Of course, there is also a black hole scenario. In this scenario, the asteroid would break up into several larger pieces and these would now be hurtling towards Earth.
Alternatively, a spaceship could crash into it and change its course. The consequences of such a strategy are being studied by the Don Quixote programme, set up by the European Space Agency, or ESA.
In a third version, a spacecraft would intercept the asteroid, turn on its engines and slowly push the looming mass out of its path. It could also be fired at with lasers.
One of the more unusual possibilities is to shoot paint at an asteroid to illuminate it. The pressure of the light particles bouncing off the reflective surface would change the path of the rock. Which of these has already been tested in practice? So far, nothing.
