The massive meteorite on Lake Ontario and New York State creates lightning, sonic booms.

Entry of a large meteorite into the atmosphere filmed in Canada and the eastern United States

An unusually large meteor created a stir around the upper eastern United States in the Great Lakes region and across Southern Ontario to Canada around noon local time on Wednesday, December 2, 2020. The meteor was notable not only for its size, but also due to its proximity to populated areas, allowing it to be captured throughout the region via video and surveillance systems.

“Holy cow, I think it was a shooting star but during the day … or a bomb!” said sled dog driver Bekka Gunner of Holland, New York, in the United States. Gunner was training with his Untamed Adventure Dogs sled dog team when he captured the comet’s entrance in a video in broad daylight. His video was posted on Syracuse.com, a local news bulletin.

Surveillance video from the top of Toronto’s 1,800-foot-high Ontario CN tower showed the brilliant flash of fireball disintegration.

The meteor, also called a fireball, entered Earth’s atmosphere at “speeds of 56,000 mph at 12:08 pm ET,” according to NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office director Bill Cooke. Cooke went on to tell reporters that the meteor disintegrated when it entered Earth’s atmosphere at approximately 116,000 feet or 22 miles in altitude, somewhere between Rochester and Syracuse, New York.

By comparison, a multiple independent reentry vehicle (MIRV) warhead from an ICBM travels much slower than Wednesday’s fireball, re-entering Earth’s atmosphere during its terminal attack phase at around 15,000 mph according to the Center for Arms Control and Non. -Proliferation.

“Having something that close to a big city is pretty rare,” Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society said in an NBC News report by Tim Stelloh.

Wednesday’s fireball was reminiscent of the massive Chelyabinsk meteor that caused widespread damage on February 15, 2013, entered Earth’s atmosphere in southeastern Russia. The massive sonic boom and shock waves caused by the Chelyabinsk “super fireball” meteor broke glass, blew doors and injured people due to flying debris. In one case an entire roof of a factory collapsed due to the shock wave. Due to the angle of reentry, the Chelyabinsk meteor broke into small fragments in the upper atmosphere, flooding the region with shrapnel from the meteor. Interestingly, the Chelyabinsk meteor was not detected during its approach to Earth’s atmosphere because its trajectory was coming from the direction of the sun, making detection difficult.

Most recently, on August 1, 2018 at 5:14 pm Washington DC time, a Meteor exploded with a force of 2.1 kilotons 43 km above the missile early warning radar at Thule Air Base.

It would appear that this newer fireball also largely disintegrated when it entered Earth’s atmosphere. So far, no reports of meteor fragments have emerged, suggesting that none or very few have reached the ground. Any fragments that survived entering the atmosphere may have landed in the eastern Great Lakes.