I can do better than that, I can reproduce it here in its entirety, since there is not much point in publishing it elsewhere as it was just a comment for publication in their correspondence section with regards the subject of the Russian meteor in that the author of the Nature news article said that it was the largest event in a century.
Quote
The title and contents of the News Article “Russian meteor largest in a century”[1], regarding the 15th February Russian meteor may not be correct. In the article Geoff Brumfiel asserts that the Russian Meteor is the largest meteor event since the ~20 Megatonne (Mt) of TNT equivalent Tunguska event of 1908. However, on the 13th August 1930 an airburst over the region of the River Curuça in the Brazilian Amazon is estimated to be an order of magnitude less (~2 Mt) than Tunguska equivalent 1908 Tunguska airburst[2]. Data from multiple infrasound stations now estimate the Russian Meteor to be 17m in size with total energy yield of ~0.5 Mt[3]. Given that energy scales proportionately with mass (assuming similar velocities), and that mass scales with the cube of linear dimensions (for constant density), then the Curuça object could be as much as 1.5 times larger in size than the Russian bolide.
1) Nature, doi:10.1038/nature.2013.12438
2) Bailey, M. E., Markham, D. J., Massai, S., & Scriven, J. E. The Observatory, vol. 115, p.250-253 (1995)
3) [
www.nasa.gov] Last accessed 18-02-13
Jonny
The path to good scholarship is paved with imagined patterns. - David M Raup
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2013 08:24AM by JonnyMcA.
