Almost at the same time as an asteroid came dangerously close (in NASA’s terms) to earth, so came the news about a meteorite streaming through the sky over Russia’s Chelyabinsk region. So far, it is estimated that the shockwave has caused severe damage to property and over 1,200 are reported injured, though that number continues to climb.
The meteorite landed in a lake near Chebarkul, a town in Chelyabinsk region, and Friday morning's dramatic passage was witnessed hundreds of kilometres away.
The explosion rivalled a nuclear blast, but the meteor was still too small for advance-warning networks to spot.
This is a typical Black Swan event that unfortunately cannot be prepared for.
Just to remind readers, a Black Swan must have the following three attributes.
- It is an outlier, beyond the realm of regular expectations, because experience can’t point to its possibility.
- It carries an extreme impact.
- After the fact we produce explanations for its occurrence, making it explainable and predictable and by extension, preventable.
As
Morgan O’Rourke pointed out in a 2011 piece in “Risk Management”, “If a large space rock chooses to head our way there really isn’t much we can do about it, regardless of Bruce Willis’ formidable skill set.”
Wired backs that up, stating, “All the advanced air defenses that humanity has invested in? The interceptor missile that are (sometimes) able to stop an adversary missile from impacting? The early-warning monitoring systems that are supposed to give humanity enough time to plan a response? They are useless, useless against a meteorite onslaught.”
A 20,000-strong team has been sent to the Ural mountains as part of a rescue and clean-up operation, Russia's emergency, ministry says.
This wasn’t Russia’s first encounter with a massive meteorite. On July 30, 1908, a devastating explosion occurred in the skies over Siberia with the strength 1,000 times that of the Hiroshima blast at the end of WWII. Today’s blast in Russia is now the second largest meteorite to hit earth in the last century or so The 1908 event ranks as first.
A clip from the History Channel explains:
