A sonic boom heard across the Midlands on Thursday sent people searching for an answer Friday, and experts who spoke about it said the cause was still not clear. Reports came in from Columbia and surrounding counties, with additional accounts from Darlington County and Chesterfield County.
Ashwini Karmarker, an assistant professor in the University of South Carolina’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, was among the experts asked to explain what may have happened. Dr. Venkat Narayanaswamy, a professor in North Carolina State University’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, also weighed in as the event drew attention after the United States Geological Survey reported the sonic boom late Thursday evening.
The wide footprint of the reports is part of what made the event hard to pin down. A sonic boom can be heard across a broad area, and the accounts that surfaced from Columbia, Darlington County and Chesterfield County suggested this one was not confined to a single neighborhood or city block.
But the central fact remained unchanged on Friday: no one was yet saying what produced it. The late Thursday report from the United States Geological Survey documented the boom, but it did not settle the question of cause, leaving experts to discuss possibilities without a confirmed explanation.
For now, the sonic boom South Carolina residents heard on Thursday remains an unresolved episode. The experts can describe how such a sound travels and why it may reach so many places at once, but the source behind this one has not been identified.
