An Earth-Shattering Kaboom

We took advantage of a rare open schedule to slip up to Lake Tahoe this weekend. We did some sledding near the house, and later lunched amoung the beautiful people at Squaw Valley, all in mid-70s temperatures under spectacular blue skies.

Sunday morning, we were startled out of our lazy start to the day by a resounding boom that shook the house and trailed off in a long echo. It was a little like somebody taking a run at a sliding glass door and bouncing off, but amplified many times over. Daisy has been known to run into closed doors, so that wasn't completely beyond the realm of possibility, but the sound was just to big and all encompassing for that. It was like a single peal of thunder, with no preamble and no follow-up reverberations. I concluded that it was a sonic boom, but could not figure out why we would have experienced one. I could only surmise that a military jet flying across the deserted wastelands of western Nevada had strayed too close to populated areas at high speed.

As it turns out, we did hear a sonic boom. So did people across California, from the Bay Area to Reno and Las Vegas. The source of the noice, as it turns out, was somewhat more worrying than a wayward warplane. A meteor the size of a washing machine tore through the low atmosphere, turning into a fireball that was plainly visible in bright sunlight as it streaked to earth, ripping off a sonic boom as it passed through the sound barrier. It is presumed that pieces of the meteor made it all the way to the ground, even after it burned and broke up on its passage to earth.

I think I am glad I did not see the meteor come in. I might have been a little alarmed if I had seen a bright fireball streak across the morning sky, accompanied by a sonic boom. Manmade or alien, whatever it was could have been terrifying to witness.

I hate to think that my last thought, as the earth was blasted asunder by a meteor strike, could have been, "the Mayans were right!"