http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1346411.ece
As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact
comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.
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.
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Hvordan går det med den meteor der falt ned på Grønland, han man stadig ikke fundet den?
Jan Rasmussen