(Rome) A detonation heard Thursday in the Mediterranean, Tuscany and the French island of Corsica, which a number of authorities and residents initially attributed to an earthquake, may have been caused by the fall of a meteorite, experts said Friday.
Posted at 8:27 a.m.
The town of Campo nell’Elba, on the Italian tourist island of Elba, off the coast of Tuscany, said on Facebook that a nearby tracking station had “captured a seismic and acoustic event felt by everyone” at 10:30 a.m. ET Thursday.
“Two significant tremors”, recorded on the “Corte seismometer” (Haute-Corse) were felt Thursday at 10:30 a.m. (Eastern time) “in a weak to moderate manner across the entire Corsican eastern façade”, from Cap Corse to the eastern plain, Baptiste Vignerot, regional director of the Bureau of Geological and Mining Research (BRGM) of Corsica, told AFP on Friday.
They did “no damage”, he added.
These tremors, long “a little less than a minute with then a propagation of a wave for 45 seconds”, “are not linked, a priori, with a telluric movement, therefore with an earthquake since the shape of the signals do not correspond to what we usually have,” he added.
This “really reminds us of supersonic type air movements” like “when planes break the sound barrier, except that here, it seems really loud for a supersonic plane,” he said.
This can be caused by “a whole bunch of phenomena”, including an “underwater or aerial explosion”, but a “natural source is still preferred”, he clarified, judging it “possible”, “the hypothesis of having a bolide or an asteroid” (a meteorite is a fragment of an asteroid, Editor’s note). A bolide is the luminous phenomenon caused by the entry into the atmosphere at high speed of a meteor.
“We can have tremors with waves like this when asteroids enter the atmosphere and disintegrate in the upper atmosphere”, but “never this strong”, he added, speaking of a “big event” whose “probability of occurrence is extremely low” and which “has not been measured” previously “especially in the region”.
The president of the regional government of Tuscany, Eugenio Giani, initially declared that it was an earthquake, before backtracking after the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) had brushed aside this hypothesis.
For its part, the Italian Air Force told Mr. Giani that it was in no way involved.
“The type of event causing the tremor” felt “across the entire Tuscan coast and in some inland areas is not yet confirmed,” Mr. Giani wrote on social media.
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.
This is not the first time that mysterious detonations have been heard on the island of Elba, specifies the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Similar events occurring in 2012, 2016 and 2023 have not yet been explained.
