Video: Flaming meteor crashes in Russia, injures roughly 1,000

A meteor zipped through the sky and crashed near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk at 9:23 a.m. local time Friday morning, injuring roughly 1,000 people.

Multiple citizens in the city of about 46,000 near the Ural mountains captured video of the incident, which showed a trail of smoke through the sky, ending in a giant fireball.

Videos like this (which, be warned, probably contains much cursing in Russian):

And this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXT_B4kx6YA

Chelyabinsk resident Polina Zolotarevskaya described the incident to BBC News: “It was quite extraordinary. We saw a very bright light and then there was a kind of a track, white and yellow in the sky. The explosion was so strong that some windows in our building and in the buildings that are across the road and in the city in general, the windows broke.”

Most of the injuries reported were thought to be from breaking glass due to the meteor’s shockwave, reports The Guardian.

The Russian Academy of Sciences reported that the meteor weighed at least 10 tonnes and that it exploded 30-50 km above the ground. Most of it burned up before it hit the ground and, luckily, the meteorite landed in a lake about 1km outside Chebarkul and not in the city itself, reports BBC News.

The meteor is not thought to be related to asteroid 2012 DA14, which will also fly within 28,000 km of Earth today.