Earth under threat: Meteori 10 times more powerful than Hiroshima hit land in December

The explosion of the meteor in the Bering Sea at the end of last year appears to have had 10 times more energy than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, scientists have discovered.

The fiery ball erupted across the sky of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia on December 18th and released energy equivalent to 173 kilotones of TNT, Periscopi translates. It was the largest since the next meteor in Chelyabinsk's atmosphere in southwest Russia, six years ago, and the second largest in the last 30 years.

Unlike the Chelyabinsk meteor, which was picked up by CCTV, mobile phones and car cameras, the latter went unnoticed in December because it exploded in an uninhabited location.

Nassa received information about that explosion by the US Air Force after military satellites detected a visible and infrared light from the fireball in December. Lindley Johnson from Nassau told the BBC News that explosions of this magnitude have only been expected to occur 2 or 3 times within a century.

A meteor specialist named Peter Brown from Western University in Canada managed to catch the explosion with his equipment from global monitoring stations.

This event is another reminder of the fact that despite attempts to identify spacestones that could threaten planet Earth, meteors can arrive without warning. Nassa is working to identify 90 percent of asteroids near land larger than 140m by 2020, but the task could take 30 years to complete.

The most powerful metere has erupted in 1908 in Tunguska, Siberia, destroying nearly 80 million trees across a vast area. /Periscopi