Tunguska mystery (almost) solved
By Andy Kaiser
Article ID: 1240
It was a quiet morning on June 30, 1908. The event occurred in a remote location of heavily-forested Siberia, in the Russian Federation.
Instead of leaping ahead to the finale and just saying “kaboom”, we’ll make this a little more dramatic. So get ready.
A rustling is heard as a brown bear lumbers forward and stops. It drops its head and sniffs, poking its thick snout through green leafy undergrowth. It smells an appetizer.
The bear stops, and lifts its massive head. It again sniffs the air, confused. The bear has good eyesight, but trusts its nose over any other sense. It smells nothing out of the ordinary, though, yet knows something is wrong.
What is it? The bear shuffles, and swings its head to scan around. It catches a glimmer of something, something bright and shining far above the trees.
Massive muscles flex, and the bear hoists itself up a tree for a better view. A blue light shines far above, like a second sun.
The bear snorts, and drops heavily to earth. It doesn’t care about what’s up in the air. It’s more concerned with stuff on the ground, and what part of that stuff is edible.
Then the world explodes. A roaring wall of noise slams into the bear. All surrounding trees lean away, as if flinching in unison against a terrifying power. In the next moment, everything bursts into flames. The bear spends his last living moments roaring at this new enemy, this massive invader from the sky.
It takes only a few more seconds to raze 80 million trees over 800 square miles. Everything is destroyed. Everything burns.
This overly-dramatic-yet-plausible story is about the Tunguska explosion. No one positively knows what happened that day, and what caused such devastation. The Tunguska event was so destructive and so complete, it made later analysis difficult.
Here are some known facts about the Tunguska explosion:
The blast analysis tells us the explosion occurred a few miles above the earth - perhaps between three and six miles.
The blast force was ten to fifteen megatons - that’s roughly a thousand times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb.
To put this in a better perspective, some scientists think that a similar meteor impact 66 million years ago was the cosmic sledgehammer that wiped out the dinosaurs.
What happened here? Many theories have been raised over the years. These include an antimatter explosion, a miniature black hole tearing through the Earth, a natural gas explosion, and the accidental crash of an alien spacecraft.
According to RIA Novosti, a Russian-language news site, researchers have found evidence of acid rain in the epicenter of the explosion. This acid was presumably formed by the ill-fated meteorite screaming through the Earth’s atmosphere. Atmospheric oxygen combined with nitrogen. Mix in some incredibly high temperatures, and you get nitrogen oxides. These oxides are found where the explosion is thought to have occurred.
Diamond-graphite rock formations have been found at the scene. These tiny, super-hard granules are created by taking a bunch of carbon, and subjecting it to massive pressure, like, for example, what you might get from the detonation of a thousand atomic bombs.
Almost twenty years after the Tunguska explosion, witnesses were interviewed (note that the time delay was due to arguably more important things, like an impending World War I and the Russian Revolution). Their testimonies include descriptions of what you would expect from a huge explosion, like violent earthquakes, massive heat and blinding light. One interviewee seems to have seen the meteor itself, saying:
“…the peasants saw to the North-West, rather high above the horizon, some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards. The body appeared as a “pipe”, i.e. a cylinder. The sky was cloudless, only a small dark cloud was observed in the general direction of the bright body. It was hot and dry. As the body neared the ground (forest), the bright body seemed to smudge, and then turned into a giant billow of black smoke, and a loud knocking (not thunder) was heard, as if large stones were falling, or artillery was fired. All buildings shook. At the same time the cloud began emitting flames of uncertain shapes. All villagers were stricken with panic and took to the streets, women cried, thinking it was the end of the world.”
To the frustration of the credulous, we are getting closer and closer to a definite answer about the Tunguska mystery. While we can’t say for sure the explosion was caused by a meteor, the probability is high.
While exciting, impressive, and initially perplexing, the Tunguska mystery is becoming less and less of a mystery. It’s now just another natural event illuminated clearly by the light of advanced science. Some may see this as depriving the world of wonder. I see it as walking in the dark, and finally seeing the light.
New article email alerts
Podcast on iTunes
Podcast RSS feed
Leave a comment