A meteorite fall could be the cause of a mysterious detonation heard on Thursday evening in the Mediterranean

What caused the tremor was moving at a speed of 600 kilometers per second (illustration). Unsplash – Simon Schwyter

A detonation heard this Thursday, June 20, 2024 in the Mediterranean, Tuscany and on the French island of Corsica, and which some authorities and residents initially attributed to an earthquake, could have been caused by the fall of a meteorite, experts said on Friday.

The town of Campo nell'Elba, on the Italian tourist island of Elba off Tuscany, said on Facebook that a nearby tracking station had "captured a seismic and acoustic event felt by everyone" at 2:30 p.m. GMT Thursday.

Two significant tremors

"Two significant tremors", recorded on the "Corte seismometer& ;quot; (Upper Corsica) were felt Thursday at 2:30 p.m. GMT "in a weak to moderate manner across the entire eastern Corsican façade& quot;, 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 "d'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 does not correspond to what we usually have", he added.

This "really sounds like supersonic 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 one "underwater or aerial explosion" but one &quot ;natural source is still preferred", he clarified, judging "possible", "the'hypothesis to have 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 so 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 meteorite hypothesis

The president of the regional government of Tuscany, Eugenio Giani, initially declared that it was an earthquake, before to backtrack after the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) brushed aside this hypothesis.

For its part, the Italian Air Force indicated to Mr. Giani that it was in no way involved. &quot ;The type of event causing a shock" felt "along the entire coast Tuscany and in some interior areas, is not yet confirmed", Mr. Giani wrote on social networks.

What caused the tremor was moving at a speed of 600 kilometers per second, said the region's geophysics institute and the ;University of Florence in a press release.

"The hypothesis of a meteorite entering the atmosphere seems the most probable and corresponds to the recorded data&quot ;, 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 in 2012, 2016 and 2023 have not yet been explained.