首页  | 新闻播报

Russia cleans up after meteor blast injures more than 1,200

中国日报网 2013-02-18 10:12

分享到微信

Get Flash Player

Download

Thousands of Russian emergency workers went out on Saturday to clear up the damage from a meteor that exploded over the Ural Mountains, damaging buildings, shattering windows and showering people with broken glass.

Divers searched a lake near Chelyabinsk, where a hole several meters wide had opened in the ice, but had so far failed to find any large fragments, officials said.

The scarcity of evidence on the ground fuelled scores of conspiracy theories over what caused the fireball and its huge shockwave on Friday in the area, where there are many defense industry plants.

Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky told reporters in Moscow it could have been "warmongers" in the United States. "It's not meteors falling. It's a new weapon being tested by the Americans," he said.

A priest from near the explosion site called it an act of God. Social media sites were flooded with speculation about what might have caused the explosion.

Asked about the speculation, an official at the local branch of Russia's Emergencies Ministry simply replied, "Rubbish".

Residents of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 1,500 km east of Moscow, heard an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave that blew out windows and damaged the wall and roof of a zinc plant.

The fireball traveling at 30 km per second, according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, blazed across the horizon, leaving a long white trail visible as far as 200 km away.

NASA estimated the object was 55 feet across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.

It exploded kilometers above Earth, releasing nearly 500 kilotons of energy - about 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War II, NASA added.

Search teams said they had found small objects up to about 1 cm wide that might be fragments of a meteorite, but no larger pieces.

Questions:

1. Which mountains did the meteor explode over?

2. What type of city is Chelyabinsk?

3. How many kilometers per second was the fireball traveling at?

Answers:

1. The Ural Mountains.

2. An industrial city.

3. 30km/second.

(中国日报网英语点津 Helen 编辑)

About the broadcaster:

Emily Cheng is an editor at China Daily. She was born in Sydney, Australia and graduated from the University of Sydney with a degree in Media, English Literature and Politics. She has worked in the media industry since starting university and this is the third time she has settled abroad - she interned with a magazine in Hong Kong 2007 and studied at the University of Leeds in 2009.

中国日报网英语点津版权说明:凡注明来源为“中国日报网英语点津:XXX(署名)”的原创作品,除与中国日报网签署英语点津内容授权协议的网站外,其他任何网站或单位未经允许不得非法盗链、转载和使用,违者必究。如需使用,请与010-84883561联系;凡本网注明“来源:XXX(非英语点津)”的作品,均转载自其它媒体,目的在于传播更多信息,其他媒体如需转载,请与稿件来源方联系,如产生任何问题与本网无关;本网所发布的歌曲、电影片段,版权归原作者所有,仅供学习与研究,如果侵权,请提供版权证明,以便尽快删除。
本文相关阅读
5af95d3ba3103f6866ee845a

Russia mourns flood victims

人气排行
中国日报网 英语点津微信
中国日报网 双语小程序