“When Armageddon is near, you better get out of of here. Looking like a Deep Impact. I ain’t afraid of no ‘stroid” #metrodetroitmeteor pic.twitter.com/MdibIt82TZ
— Topher No Grace (@topherlaine) January 17, 2018
Last night, at about 8:10PM, some residents of Michigan had no idea what to make of things as the ground shook and a bright light flashed in the air. While there was some initial speculation that it was an earthquake, it was later confirmed to be a meteor that exploded with enough force to register with the force of a magnitude-2.0 earthquake on seismometers.
The U.S. Geological Survey makes clear that it’s not possible to directly compare the power of a meteor and an actual earthquake, since the meteor is simply shaking the ground with an explosion while an earthquake’s source is much different and below the surface, it’s pretty clear that this was a powerful event. In more than one video recorded close to the meteor itself—though the American Meteor Society says it was visible from as many as seven states and Canada—the sky lights up almost like time-lapse footage of the Sun passing overhead.
In the video below, you can both see the flash and hear the explosion if you stick around (the flash begins at 0:16, and the boom doesn’t come until 2:40) and turn your volume up a bit. Judging by the roughly two minutes and 25 seconds for the sound to arrive, the video was recorded about 30 miles from the explosion.
Although those even farther away still got a pretty impressive light show:
#meteor scared the buhjesus out of us pic.twitter.com/qFcFMotFDi
— PirateHooker (@BlackBeerded) January 17, 2018
(via Live Science, image: Michael Patterson on Flickr)
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