• Question: what was was the first meteor called and when did it fall and how big was it?

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sarah Casewell

      Sarah Casewell answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I don’t think anyone knows – but there are some very large meteor craters on the earth – one is supposed to have wiped out the dinosaurs.
      The oldest ones know date to 3000 BC but there may be ones we don’t know about yet!

    • Photo: Nate Bastian

      Nate Bastian answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Meteors are falling to earth continuously, and have been doing so for billions of years. When the worth was young, about 4 billion years ago, there were many more meteors hitting earth than today. In fact, the earth itself was built up through meteor and comet impacts.

      Probably the biggest meteor impact ever happened when the earth was extremely young, only a few hundred million years old. This impact was so big that it actually broke the earth apart. Most of the earth reformed, but part of it got away, and formed the moon. This is (most likely) where the moon comes from.

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      As the others say, it’s hard to know about the ones that hit a very long time ago. But the biggest one we know of is the Vredefort meteorite, which was an asteroid which hit what is now South Africa. It was about 10km wide, which is the size of a small city! The crater it made when it hit is 160 miles wide!

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      The first meteor would be impossible to determine because it would have formed and fallen billions of years ago! Some of the largest meteorites (meteors that have landed on Earth’s surface) are very large and some are tiny! The largest can weigh several tonnes and the smallest are microscopic dusts!

      Luckily for us, we’ve not had a large meteorite impact for many millions of years! They can be absolutely devastating when they do fall, like the Chicxulub impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 64.5 million years ago when it fell in the Gulf of Mexico!

    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      There is another meteor that was pretty big and pretty scary — it’s the one that fell over an inhabited part of Russia in 1908 (in the Tunguska forest). It’s believed that the meteor exploded in the air, maybe 5 or 10 kms up, and gave out as much energy as 1,000 atomic bombs!

      Fortunately it fell in a region with no people, otherwise it would have destroyed an entire city! It did take down about 80 million trees, though!

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