It appears that meteors of the sort that exploded in the air near Chelyabinsk in Russia are more common than scientists thought. The speeding rock caused a sensation when it streaked across the Russian sky last February, and the airborne blast created a concussion that broke windows. The bright light gave some people burned skin and the shock wave caused injuries on the ground.

Now some scientific analysis brings more information.

Most of the rock evaporated when it blew up 18.5 miles above Earth’s surface. Our atmosphere is 60 miles thick, or approximately the distance from St. Cloud to Minneapolis. So if the Chelyabinsk meteor were a metro area family returning home from a weekend up north at about 42,000 miles per hour (yes, that’s about how fast some of them drive), they made it to somewhere around Rogers before everything fell apart. That’s almost home by my reckoning.

Much of our worry has been focused on space rubble that’s more than a half-mile wide, but this lump was just 65 feet across. NASA is tracking more than 10,000 comets and asteroids though fewer than 1,500 have been classified as potentially hazardous to Earth. But the Chelyabinsk Chunk was made of a composite of gray and black stone, which reflects little light and is harder to spot. There may be more than 20 million asteroids with orbits that bring them close to Earth.

We can’t really protect ourselves against smaller space rocks. Gulp.

Where I once thought of space as cold, clean and empty, now I think of it as something like my basement, full of miscellaneous stuff I stopped thinking about.

Maybe rather than sending out movie-inspired space missions loaded with misfit deep-core drillers and explosives experts to destroy large threatening asteroids, we should launch misfit graffiti artists into orbit to paint the most threatening small debris so we can at least see it.

But this news, combined with our growing awareness of the long-term cost of concussions, will hasten the day when we all wear protective headgear most of the time, as both a fashion and safety statement.

Seriously.

Describe your everyday helmet – shape, color, decorations.

Just when we had completely forgotten about its vast potential for holding deep mysteries, Antarctica’s sub-glacial Lake Vostok is back in the news. And I find nothing in this new information that will change the deep concern that grew out of our previous encounter with this topic.

The news that Lake Vostok, hidden under ice for 15 billion years, is teeming with life, should give us pause. This is another step down the path originally imagined for this scientific story – the cinematic tale of research gone wrong where curiosity runs out ahead of prudence and rips the top off a container holding a monumental amount of trouble.

Already we have discovered that the story includes many of the stock characters from a standard sci-fi disaster – the researchers who are genuinely EXCITED to find that 95 per cent of the 3,500 some-odd DNA sequences found in the lake are associated with bacteria.

In case you’re wondering where we will find the dialog for this horror film, it is being written in the labs where they examine Vostok’s ice cores. For example, someone has already said this about the DNA findings ” … that doesn’t necessarily mean the unrecognized sequences are exotic forms of life.”

That line will be given to the first scientist to be engulfed and dissolved by the plasma-like creature that bubbles up out of his beaker while he has his back turned on it. Guaranteed.

Aside from all the obvious reasons NOT to take a big drink out of a chilled bottle of Vostok Spring, there is this – the scientists who found loads of bacteria in the submerged lake acknowledge that they only found recognizable life forms because that’s the only type of life they know how to look for.

Ergo, the life forms we have never encountered (if there are any) would still go undetected. They remain invisible until their effects become known!

And what of the more complex life forms living in the dark, slushy Vostokian bottoms? When we withdraw them from their chilly surroundings and introduce them to the modern world, there is no assurance that they will be grateful to us for doing it.

Much like the character in this James Taylor song, “The Frozen Man“.

You have been frozen in ice for one million years. Assuming your vital organs are intact (you didn’t donate them to science, did you?) would you want to be thawed out and re-introduced to the world?

Now that the weather has turned warmer, I was not expecting to write about ice – especially after so many months with the opportunity right outside my window every single day. But this video from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory amazed me. The scientists there have figured out what might cause unusual markings they’ve seen on the surface of Mars. Downhill tracks that have a distinctive profile – a certain shape that helps explain how they were formed.

Under the right temperature conditions, dry ice can glide down a slope on a cushion of gas.

I love it that researchers were able to duplicate the effect here on Earth. Sliding blocks of dry ice down sand dunes is a form of light entertainment I hope to try someday – a kind of stranded-in-the-desert shuffleboard, I guess.

The notion of ice in motion reminded me of this incident from a couple of months ago, when the slowly melting lake ice in Lake Mille Lacs was pushed by a spring wind to create a real-life version of the voracious ice monster in a child’s nightmares. It comes across as the evil spawn of a slithering blob and a slow-motion avalanche.

Fun, at first. But horrifyingly relentless as it creeps, creepily.

I realize that we do not have to worry much about hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes in the Upper Midwest, but it feels like the ice is all around us, and on the advance.

What natural phenomenon strikes you as unnatural?