There was a meteorite fall captured on video last year. On Prince Edward Island; hit someone’s walkway:
Hmmm. The most famous meteorite to hit a house is Sylacauga and almost certainly is what an American layperson means when they mention one. I can’t find any reference to that insurance claim related to Sylacauga, so I suspect it is apocryphal.
BTW, meteorites that strike human artifacts are called hammerstones or hammer stones, and are highly coveted in the collector’s market, as are pieces of whatever they hit, like these specimens.
I have only one hammerstone represented my collection: Kobe, which is a small, rare carbonaceous chondrite that penetrated a roof in Japan. It shattered into several pieces that were taken by Japanese scientists. But a meteorite collector/researcher/dealer who lives in Tokyo bought the vacuum cleaner bag where the homeowner had cleaned up the celing debris and sorted through it under a dissecting microscope to recover a couple of grams of crumbs, which are all that became available for collectors. (This is my portion.)
Here is a thread about that one.
One hit a house in BC a few years back. Almost hit a woman laying in bed. A superficial google didn’t find anything about an insurance claim. However, numerous hits say that insurance covers meteorite damage, so there wouldn’t really be a need to disguise the cause of damage.
Being in Arizona, the natural history museum where I volunteer has some specimens from Barringer Crater along with this photo on the wall. I would joke that if it had struck a millisecond earlier it would have wiped out the visitor center but too many people were buying it so I stopped.
rom the looks of that pic you should switch to telling them the meteor was obviously square. See how many will bite off on that one.
New what-if:
Brian
Videos? Somebody forgot to tell me about the steekin’ videos!
ETA: Holy Moses, there’s 21 of 'em. Some of which are about topics I’ve never seen online in the regular site format.
I didn’t pick up exactly how much height per story he was allowing for.
Long before you get to orbital height, wouldn’t the ground underneath it start causing problems. To start, crushing under the weight and then later, well giving way until the skyscraper starts to sink into the mantle.
“Next stop, 17,503rd floor. Men’s socks and hot lava. Mind the gap.”
The mega-mega-mega-skyscraper (100 million stories) just about tops out at the moon, which is 1.26 billion feet away. So 12.6 feet per story.
“But the fourth one stayed up!”
Hot magma
Which ones aren’t covered by the site?
“What’s weirder is that muons turned out to be INCREDIBLY cute.”
Plus when you cuddle them, they say “mew, mew”. Who can resist that?
Sure, but only for 2.2 μs.
Those are the muons. The muuuuuoooons last longer.
“They may technically have been softwoods at some point, but they definitely aren’t now.”
Strictly speaking, the vast majority of the Carboniferous coal forests were neither hardwood nor softwood. Just wood-wood.
They were tree ferns, seed ferns, club mosses and horsetails.