Explosive Russian Fireball Among Most Powerful Ever Recorded, New Study Says [VIDEO]

The fireball created in February by a meteor over Russia's Ural Mountains had the explosive power of 460 kilotons of TNT and was the largest explosion ever recorded by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization's infrared sensors, according to the first detailed analysis of the event, which was reported Monday by the Nature news blog.

Together with the Siberia's 1908 Tunguska fireball, the fireball on Feb. 15 over the city of Chelyabinsk was among the most energetic events ever instrumentally recorded, yielding more far power than even a nuclear bomb. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization is an international body which watches the Earth for nuclear-weapons tests

The fireball injured at least 1,000 people, mainly from broken glass.

"It was a very, very powerful event," Margaret Campbell-Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, told Nature in February.

Twenty infrasonic stations around the world recorded data from the fireball.

In 2009 a fireball over Indonesia was recorded by 17 infrasonic stations.

A paper recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters reported in its abstract that so many devices able to record the event "provides a prominent milestone for studying in detail infrasound propagation around the globe."

It will likely be several decades before the infrasonic devices will record a similarly powerful explosion. Fireball as powerful as the Chelyabinsk event only occur on an average of every 75 years, according to Nature.