26 October 2009: Earth just got hit by another meteor, this time in Latvia (update: it was a hoax)

Edit: looks like this was a hoax. Impressive! I'll leave the original post as-is though for posterity.

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Yet another meteorite impact - this one hit Latvia and ended up creating a fiery crater about 5 metres in depth. That link has a video of the crater while it was burning so definitely check it out.

And all this only a day after NASA released a report on another meteorite impact in Indonesia earlier this month. These meteor strikes are actually quite timely as the Arecibo Observatory can point to them as reason enough to keep the observatory well funded since it's our best way to detect these objects before they strike. We obviously need more capability than what we have at present though since fairly large meteors continue to slip past us before we have a chance to spot them.

Just one country to the north we have a good example of what a much larger meteorite strike looks like - Kaali Järv, a small lake in Estonia formed from an ancient meteorite impact. That crater was certainly an inferno after it first fell and a disaster zone for years after, but now it's a nice lake with beautiful trees surrounding it and a school nearby. I went there in 1998.