A meteor exploded over the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Russia, with the power of 10 Hiroshima bombs in December of 2018. The event was captured by Japan’s Himawari satellite. The rock was traveling at 20 miles per second and it was only discovered on March 15, 2019, when researchers spotted the smoke trail from the exploded space rock and found the video proof from Himawari.
The meteor’s smoke cloud was recorded at 2350 GMT in the same location over the Bering Sea that was recorded by NASA’s monitoring sensors.
The smoke trail is almost vertical, showing that it entered the atmosphere very steeply, and it’s possible to see a long, thin shadow cast by the smoke cloud against the Earth’s cloud layer below.
He said, “It appears in the images at the right time, it is in the right location, the smoke column is almost vertical, and the smoke is very high. Much higher than any clouds in that region and too high to be a contrail.”
The giant fireball hit the atmosphere with the force of 173 kilotons of TNT, ten times the force of the atomic bomb which the US dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the second world war.
The explosion is the third-largest in modern times, after an explosion over the Russian Chelyabinsk region in 2013 and a massive explosion that occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908, known as the Tunguska event. That air burst was so powerful that it flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres.
xA video showing the smoke trail from the #Meteor over the Bering Strait last December, produced using data from @JMA_kishou's #Himawari satellite.The orange meteor trail in the middle, shadow above-left. Hi-res copy: https://t.co/EXn8sFb556pic.twitter.com/X54InkvMnl
— Simon Proud (@simon_sat) March 19, 2019