Green Meteor Appears to Strike an Erupting Volcano; Geologist Analysis

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]This video is NOT AI generated. What you  are looking at is the actively erupting Mayon volcano in the Philippines appear to get  struck by a meteor as it flashes across the sky as a bright green color. For additional proof,  here’s the infrared camera view the local phivolcs government camera caught of the same falling mass  of rock. However, despite what it might appear in this clip courtesy of the afartv youtube channel,  go check them out and thank you by the way, Mayon did not actually get struck by a small asteroid or  meteor. Instead, this is just a perspective trick since it’s hard to quantify where objects are in  the night sky without a known reference point. It to me seems like the meteor violently fragmented  or more likely completely burned up at an altitude of around 45 kilometers or about 147,600 feet.  Based on the likelihood that the first moment this fireball became visible probably marked when  it first reached an 80 kilometers altitude in the atmosphere, I was able to approximate what I  deem to have been the meteor’s most likely path; heading south-southeast at a compass degree of  156.6 degrees. Now, you might incorrectly think that the green fireball you saw was an effect  of color adjustment on the night time webcamera.

[00:01:18]However, it’s not, as when I was a teenager I saw  a fireball of the exact same color burn across the sky above my house. Meteor fireballs can burn  up and release light as a number of colors, including but not limited to green, blue, red,  orange, and sometimes even purple. These are the dominant elements that tend to cause each color.  In the case of the meteor that burned up vaguely near Mayon, while the green coloration could  have been caused by a high nickel concentration, I personally deem it far more likely that  a high magnesium concentration was the cause. That means we might be able to actually  put up a decent guess as to what the composition of the meteor that I estimate was 1.5 meters or  4.9 feet wide was, and where it originated from.

[00:02:09]You see, for a meteor or asteroid to have a high  magnesium concentration, specifically above 19%, it needs to have a high abundance of one or both  of these two minerals; olivine and enstatite. And where do these two minerals tend to occur  in abundance? Both generally need a large differentiated asteroid in the main asteroid belt  measuring more than 20 kilometers wide, forming in the mantle and crust of such an asteroid  respectively. This means that iron meteorites, and chondrites as whole can be ignored, leaving  the possibility of a stony-iron pallasite, or more likely, an achondrite. While pallasites  represent material from the mantle-core boundary of a differentiated asteroid, achondrites  are pieces of crust from a differentiated asteroid that were expelled into space by a  collision. Many of these collisions occurred billions of years ago, leaving pieces of rock  that still occasionally fall to Earth. Sadly, it is quite probable that no pieces of the meteor  survived burning up due to its small size. Now, you might be wondering how common a fireball  falling above an erupting volcano is worldwide.

[00:03:21]Surprisingly, its more common than you might  think. While a fireball can technically be seen in ideal conditions within a 1,000  kilometer radius of its fall, to get a nice high angle in its fall it needs to occur  within 250 kilometers of a spot on the ground.

[00:03:38]An estimated 5,000 fireballs occur on Earth  worldwide each year, and if we account for the fact that there are currently 43 actively erupting  volcanoes on land, and only include night time, we get the following. A high angle fireball above  an erupting volcano at night occurs somewhere in the world about once every 8.8 days. As a final note, I would like to thank this channel's patrons on Patreon and channel  members on YouTube for supporting my work!