A meteor lit up the sky in Michigan Tuesday night and a tweet from the National Weather Service in Detroit led many people to believe it resulted in a magnitude 2.0 earthquake.
Did you catch a glimpse of the meteor last night? Maybe you felt it! It lit up the sky and even registered on the Richter scale. pic.twitter.com/ImvbIuj8xN
— Univ. of Michigan (@UMich) January 17, 2018
USGS confirms meteor occurred around 810pm, causing a magnitude 2.0 earthquake: https://t.co/ikp8BG4ITp #miwx
— NWS Detroit (@NWSDetroit) January 17, 2018
That’s not exactly true according to Julie Dutton who is a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
“You can’t directly compare a meteor to the size of an earthquake. The comparison is different because the source is different —one is coming from the air and one is coming from the ground,” Dutton said.
“When we see the energy transfer on our instruments people think, ‘Oh, it hit the ground with this force,’ but that’s not necessarily true. A lot of that energy is in the air. And in this case, we don’t even know if it hit the ground,” Dutton continued.
The National Weather Service later clarified their original statement.
This is a fair point and one worth emphasizing. The meteor was about 6 feet in diameter and was traveling around 28,000 mph. The atmospheric pressure wave generated from its penetration into the atmosphere impacted the ground, causing an M2.0 to register on seismometers. https://t.co/dJT3BnKUF7
— NWS Detroit (@NWSDetroit) January 17, 2018
Still, Dutton says that while the meteor did not cause an earthquake, it is very rare for one to register on seismic networks.
NASA reports the meteor was traveling at 28,000 miles per hour and was at least a yard across.
According to the space agency about 45 tons of “meteoritic material” fall into Earth’s atmosphere every day.
