After Assault From the Heavens, Russians Search for Clues and Count Blessings
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
Published: February 16, 2013
CHEBARKUL, Russia — After a brilliant flash illuminated the sky on
Friday morning like a second sun, Alyona V. Borchininova and several
others in this run-down little town in the Siberian wilderness wandered
outside, confused and curious.
Ben Solomon for The New York Times
The police and reporters examined a 20-foot hole in
the ice of Chebarkul Lake, one of several sites in Siberia where
fragments from a meteor were believed to have struck the earth on
Friday. More Photos »
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They followed the light’s path to the town’s lakefront, where they
trudged for about a mile over the open ice until they came to a
startling sight: a perfectly round hole, about 20 feet in diameter, its
rim glossy with fresh ice that had crusted on top of the snow.
“It was eerie,” Ms. Borchininova, a barmaid, said Saturday. “So we stood
there. And then somebody joked, ‘Now the green men will crawl out and
say hello.’ ”
Russians are still coming to terms with what NASA
scientists say was a 7,000-ton chunk of space rock that hurtled out of
the sky at 40,000 miles an hour, exploding over the Ural Mountains,
spraying debris for miles around and, amazingly, killing no one.
As the Russian government pursued the scientific mysteries of the
exploding meteor, sending divers through the hole and into the inky
waters of Lake Chebarkul on Saturday, residents reacted with a kind of
giddy relief and humor over their luck at having survived a cosmic near
miss.
NASA estimates that when the meteor entered the atmosphere over Alaska,
it weighed 7,000 to 10,000 tons and was at least 50 feet in diameter, a
size that strikes the Earth about once every hundred years, and that it
exploded with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT.
The shock wave injured hundreds of people about 54 miles away in the
industrial city of Chelyabinsk, most from broken glass; collapsed a wall
in a zinc factory; set off car alarms; and sent dishes flying in
thousands of apartments. Broken windows exposed people and pipes to the
Siberian winter; many residents focused Saturday on boarding windows and
draining pipes to preserve heating systems.
If pieces of meteorite reached the surface, as NASA said was likely,
they fell largely into the sea of birch and pine trees in this patch of
western Siberia, now blanketed in snow.
Lake Chebarkul is one of four sites that the government believes felt a
significant impact, the minister of emergency situations, Vladimir
Puchkov, told the Interfax news agency.
As the sun rose there on Saturday, the snow crystals sparkling like a
million tiny mirrors, steam wafted from the ice crater, apparently
related to the work of the divers, but the lake yielded few clues.
Mr. Puchkov later said the divers had found nothing on the lake bed, but
had not ruled out meteor shrapnel as the cause of the hole.
“Experts are studying all possible places of impact,” he said. “We have no reports of confirmed discoveries.”
A meteorite fragment could help scientists better apprehend the
composition of the meteor, perhaps shedding light on how close it was to
descending further before exploding from the heat or to hitting the
surface. Such circumstances could have caused vastly more casualties in
this rust-belt region of military and industrial towns, a major nuclear
research site and waste repository, and other delicate infrastructure.
In Chelyabinsk, the worst-hit town, most who sought medical attention
had been released from hospitals by Saturday, the Ministry of Health
reported. A total of 1,158 people, including 298 children, sought
medical care. Of those, 52 were hospitalized. On Saturday afternoon, 12
adults and 3 children remained in hospitals.
Health officials evacuated to Moscow a woman who had broken two
vertebrae after falling down stairs. One man’s finger was cut off by
broken glass.
Overshadowing these misfortunes, a fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk,
Yulia Karbysheva, was being hailed as a hero for saving 44 children from
glass cuts by ordering them to hide under their desks when she saw the
flash. Having no idea what it was, she executed a duck-and-cover drill
from the cold war era, with salutary results.
Ms. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when
glass severed a tendon in one of her arms, Interfax reported; not one of
her students suffered a cut.
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