The meteorite that crash-landed near Tutshi Lake in January has no doubt made many Northerners more appreciative of such celestial events. It is not every day that an object from space lands in one's backyard.

Scientists estimate that as many as 30,000 meteorites about the size of a fist or larger fall on the Earth's surface each year. The majority fall into water and sink from sight; and only a small percentage of meteorites are ever found on land.

But large meteorites make an impact in more ways than one, and several of the world's most famous meteorites have hit the ground North of 60.

In 1918, an early Arctic explorer was astounded to find some Inuit people using knife blades, harpoon points and engraving tools made from meteoric iron, as it was assumed that northern peoples had no access to metal. In fact they had been making tools from nickel and iron for centuries. Their source was a large meteorite that landed on an island off of northern Greenland about 10,000 years ago.

Various expeditions searched for the source of the metals, but it was not found until 1894 that Robert E. Peary was led to the site called "Iron Mountain" on an island off of northern Greenland. The Inuit called the three huge chunks of meteorite there the Tent or "Ahnighito," the Woman and the Dog.

Peary spent the next three summers hauling the meteorites to the coast where they could be loaded on ships; even building a railway to cover part of the distance. Once in New York, the meteorites eventually were sold to the American Museum of Natural History. Ahnighito, which weighs 34 tons, remains the largest meteor on display in the world.

Our local meteor is estimated to have detonated with the energy of two to three kilotons of TNT. This explosion was big enough to produce two sonic booms and a glowing vapour trail that could be seen for up to one and a half hours after the explosion.

It was detected by both defense satellites and seismic monitoring instruments, and within days NASA had a plane on location collecting air samples.Compare this scenario with an explosion that occurred in Siberia towards the beginning of the century.

On June 30, 1908, a meteorite detonated above a remote region of Siberia near the Tunguska River. Estimates of its blast range from 15 to 40 megatons of TNT, making it anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 times larger than the blast at Hiroshima.

The area was remote but the impact hardly went unnoticed. People heard deafening bangs 500 kilometres away and were thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious 60 kilometres away. A group of reindeer herders, camped only 30 kilometres from the site, was knocked unconscious. One herder was reported to have died from his injuries after being blown into a tree.

The blast devastated 2,150 square kilometres of forest. Forest fires ignited by the blast burned for weeks. It was the biggest meteorite to hit the earth in the last century or so, but most of the world assumed that a large earthquake had caused the disturbance.

It was 19 years before a Russian scientist made his way to the area, convinced that a meteorite had fallen there. He found the epicenter of the impact, but no sign of a crater, and it is assumed that the meteorite exploded upwards.

To date, no remnants of the Tunguska meteorite have ever been found, and scientists still debate whether an asteroid or a comet formed the meteorite. Thankfully such large events are rare. NASA officials have referred to this recent meteorite as one of the most dramatic events of its kind in the last ten years.

More information on meteorites can be found at the website for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Another good source is Sky and Telescope Magazine.