Luke 21:11 There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven.
Russian scientists have found pieces of the meteor that exploded over the Chelyabinsk region causing millions of dollars in damage and injuring over a thousand people including a woman rushed to a Moscow hospital with a broken spine.
Fifty-three pieces of the meteor were found by Chebarkul Lake over the weekend with the largest find 7 millimeters in width. The meteor fragments were described as “dark, porous material” that was made of at least 10% metallic iron and nickel alloy.
Residents of the area discovered a 24 foot long hole in thick ice on Chebarkul Lake, leading military divers to enter the water looking for the meteor. The divers came up empty but the scientists say that is because they had no idea what they were to find. It’s likely they simply overlooked the remaining fragments.
“I am absolutely confident it should be there now that we have established its solid composition,” Viktor Grokhovsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences told reporters Monday.
The scientists were concerned that they had no way of tracking the meteorite before it reached low atmosphere and called for research into an early warning system.
“It was impossible for us to track the meteor in advance … as it was approaching from the east and completely lost in the light of the rising sun,” Vladimir Lipunov, said the head of the Space Monitoring Laboratory with Moscow State University. “If the meteor had fallen or exploded low [in the sky] above one of the numerous military or nuclear facilities near Chelyabinsk, the consequences would have been far more catastrophic.”