In the column What are the chances of a huge meteor smashing us flat?, Cecil writes:
If we extrapolate (which I realise may be entirely inappropriate to do), this should mean that a meteorite strike causing one fatality happens once in one thousand years. Although rare, it should happen occasionally.
So, are there any recorded cases of meteorite strikes causing human deaths?
On the same topic, we’re only 95 years past a meteor (NOT a meteorite) that flattened a huge area of Siberia. The Tunguska meteor exploded in the air with a force equal to a large H-bomb. It isn’t known if anyone was killed in the area, which was extremely remote, but then again, a few hundred people spread out over hundreds of square miles of Siberia wouldn’t have been missed back then. Fatalities aside, we’re within a hundred years of an H-bomb sized meteor blast; if those are as rare as one would think, it’s a heck of a coincidence–or perhaps they’re not so rare. There’s probably almost no place on land now (aside from the antarctic) where such a large blast could occur without fatalities.
Well, the cause of the Tunguska blast is still debated, isn’t it? We don’t know what it was.
What’s the coincidence you refer to?
I recommend the Fortean Times magazine (and their website www.forteantimes.com) if you are interested in Tungusta and similar mysterious events.
Forteans are a lot like Cecil: humourous, skeptical, inquisitive and open-minded but not credulous.
There are several theories as to what flattened the forest in Siberia:
A UFO exploding
A meteor or comet
Gas seeping from the ground
A mini-black hole
A super-massive hypothetical particle
The UFO is a long-shot–there is no evidence of debris or radioactivity.
In a similar fashion, there is no known meteoritic debris–the object, if it was a conventional meteor must have completely vapourized above the ground.
A Russian geologist recently put this theory forward, but there isn’t a lot of evidence–where are the craters a gas explosion would have left? More research needed.
A mini-black hole could pass through the Earth but there should have been an exit point as well.
A massive hypothetical particle–this is worth researching on your own–something or other seems to have passed through the Earth at a fair clip not long ago. Its entry and exit were recorded by seismologists only a short time apart. I can’t seem to recall enough detail to find the right search words, or I would direct you to a discussion of this possibility.
As for the extrapolition that one person is killed by a meteorite once every 1000 years, it sounds about right. Several people have been struck harmlessly or slightly injured by meteorites crashing through cars or roofs in the last century. A young British girl had one land harmlessly on her foot recently according to Ananova (www.ananova.com). If anybody has been killed by a meteorite in historical times, there is no record of the event–it may have been chalked up to some other cause, such as an airplane crash or a car accident.
I’d just like to point out that although Cecil says it isn’t proven that an meteorite killed the dinosaurs (and he’s right), it IS known that a meteorite struck the Earth about that long ago (as near as anyone can tell), and that it was a doozy.
The Chicxulub impact crater is a whopping 180-300 km in diameter. (There’s some debate over its size, mainly because it has a lot of concentric rings and it’s hard to tell which ones to count as part of the crater. Plus its buried in limestone – you can only find it by radar.) EVen if it didn’t kill off the dinosaurs, or contribute substantially to their demise, it must’ve been pretty spectacular.
Which is why a lot of folks favor a comet over an asteroid. Comets are mostly ice, and melted ice is wholly unremarkable on this planet of ours. And the evidence you mention in point 5 for a quark nugget is pure speculation, and only marginally more informative than the Tunguska event itself.
Kindly note that Cecil has also written (separately) on the Tungusta explosion.
To address the OP:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/perseids_shower_sidebar_000809.html
Some Chinese Emperor may have been.
Also, more info from this site:
Oh and from the National Public Observatory (original article seems to have expired - this is from a Google cache):
Oh, well, if it says so in the Bible, it MUST be true.
Sarcasm aside, I don’t think any of these are reliable sources. For a start, I don’t think that science in 1790 even recognised the existence of meteorites. A few years earlier famous French astronomer Lavoisier famously stated “A stone cannot fall from the sky because there ARE no stones in the sky”
In fact, we have no reliable account of someone killed by a meteorite. This does not mean that it has never happened, just that there is no reliable proof of it happening.
But stones did fall from the sky, no matter what Lavoisier said. It happens now, it happened back then and in all probability it’s been happening for the entirety of Earth’s existence. So if we have records of people dying from falling stones in 1511, then we have a reason to believe them, even if science at the time didn’t.
As you point out, that doesn’t mean it happened. But the fact that science at that point didn’t recognise the phenomenon doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
brantgoose
Try here:
Unexplained Sets of Seismographic Station Reports and A Set Consistent with a Quark Nugget Passage
Pretty technical paper, but I think that may be what you were talking about.