While details are still coming in, sources in Russia believe that an ultra-bright 10-ton meteor, also known as a bolide, disintegrated some 20 or 30 miles above the Earth’s surface in the skies of western Siberia. An accompanying sonic boom caused damage over a wide radius.
The New York Times reports that “Russia’s Interior Ministry said more than 1,000 people were injured, 200 of them children, mostly from shards of glass that shattered when the meteor entered the atmosphere,” and that the “governor of the Chelyabinsk district,” the area that right now appears to have received the brunt of the damage and injuries, “reported that a search team had found an impact crater on the outskirts of a city about 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk.” While it’s unclear if raining fragments attributed to much of the damage, Russia’s Interior Ministry claims to have found three large meteorite chunks, with 10,000 police officers looking for more.
via DVICE
This security cam footage shows you how bright the thing was:
