Meteor Explodes over Russia, Nearly 1,000 Injured

Scientists believe that a far larger meteorite strike on what today is Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula may have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. According to that theory, the impact would have thrown up vast amounts of dust that blanketed the sky for decades and altered the climate on Earth

The panic and confusion that followed Friday’s meteorite crash quickly gave way to Chelyabinsk residents’ entrepreneurial instincts. Several people smashed in the windows of their houses in the hopes of  receiving compensation, RIA Novosti news agency reported.

Others quickly took to the Internet and put what they said were meteorite fragments up for sale.

The Russian-language hashtags for the meteorite shot into Twitter’s top trends, and the country’s lively blogosphere quickly reacted with black humor.

One of the most popular jokes was that the meteorite was supposed to fall Dec. 21 last year — when many believed the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world — but was delivered late by Russia’s notoriously inefficient postal service.

Others joked that the meteorite was par for the course for Chelyabinsk, an industrial town long held to be one of the world’s most polluted areas. The area around Chelyabinsk is also home to nuclear and chemical weapons disposal facilities.

Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia noted that the area where the meteor exploded was 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Mayak nuclear storage and disposal facility, which holds dozens of tons of weapons-grade plutonium. He said the Russian government has underestimated potential risks of the region.

A chemical weapons disposal facility at Shchuchye in the Chelyabinsk region contains some 6,000 tons (5,460 metric tons) of nerve agent including sarin and VX, accounting for about 14 percent of the chemical weapons that Russia is committed to destroy.

The dramatic events prompted an array of reactions from prominent Russians.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at an economic forum in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, said the meteor could be a symbol for the forum, showing that “not only the economy is vulnerable, but the whole planet.”

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a nationalist leader noted for vehement statements, blamed the Americans.

“It’s not meteors falling. It’s the test of a new weapon by the Americans,” the RIA Novosti news agency quoted him as saying.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for leading world powers to develop a system to intercept objects falling from space.

“At the moment, neither we nor the Americans have such technologies” to shoot down meteors or asteroids, he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

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Article Appeared @http://cnsnews.com/news/article/meteor-explodes-over-russia-nearly-1000-injured

Max Seddon and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this story.

 

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