A mysterious detonation heard in the Mediterranean, in the Tuscan archipelago and in Corsica, and which authorities, residents and tourists initially attributed to an earthquake, could have been caused by the fall of a meteorite, have experts said Thursday.
The town of Campo nell’Elba, on the Italian tourist island of Elba, said on Facebook that a nearby tracking station had “captured a seismic and acoustic event felt by everyone” at 2:30 p.m. GMT (4:30 p.m. in Switzerland ). Corsican media indicated that the event was also felt on the French island.
The president of Tuscany’s regional government, Eugenio Giani, initially declared it an earthquake, before backtracking after the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) dismissed this hypothesis.
For its part, the Italian Air Force told Mr. Giani that it was in no way involved. “The type of event causing a tremor that was felt by many as an earthquake across the entire Tuscan coast and in some inland areas, is not yet confirmed,” Mr. Giani wrote on social networks.
What caused the quake was moving at a speed of 600 kilometers per second, the region’s geophysics institute and the University of Florence said in a statement. “The hypothesis of a meteorite entering the atmosphere seems the most probable and corresponds to the recorded data,” estimated these sources.
According to an anonymous source from the Italian civil protection agency cited by the Italian daily “Corriere della Sera”, “the impact would have been recorded by seismographs. The most likely hypothesis remains that of a plane.” This is not the first time that mysterious detonations have been heard on the island of Elba, specifies the “Corriere della Sera”. Similar events in 2012, 2016 and 2023 have not yet been explained.
