Close Call: Ancient Airburst Discovery in Antarctica

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center video of Chelyabinsk Airburst, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Not all meteors make it to earth….whole, or even in part. And we know from the history of Barringer Meteor Crater that even if they do strike earth, they may still vaporize and burn up, leaving almost nothing but fragments. Some meteorites just speed through the atmosphere causing whats called an air burst, such as the Chelyabinsk event in 2013- and a recent discovery in Antarctica of an Airburst event that occurred some 430,000 years ago. Air bursts, even when the meteor explodes in the upper atmosphere, cause debris trajectories which encircle the earth, seen in this video model created by NASA satellite and computer modeling.