Tunguska -The Roswell of Siberia

Unless you live under a rock you have probably seen several of the best videos of an asteroid crashing to Earth. Beyond the spectacular pictures of this fireball arch across the sky, it's amazing to see average Russians barely bat an eye and continue on their day. One reason why there are so many pictures is because many Russians have dash cam video cameras, they're used to cut down on accident insurance fraud.

This is not the first large extra-terrestrial object to impact Siberia. So far few news agencies have brought up the story of the Tunguska event.

On June 30th 1903, 7:17 local time, an extraordinarily large explosion occurred in the swamp bogs of eastern Siberia. It is a very remote region even today and it easiest found by longitude and latitude, 60.886 N by 101.894 E. 

An object estimated at about 330 feet diameter (100 meters) entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded above the Tunguska River. This was the largest impact event in recorded history. Though there are over a 1,000 academic papers on the subject most are in Russian and because of the turmoil of revolution, World War 1 and the Russian Civil War, the records of the first comprehensive expeditions were lost.  

 

The explosion was estimated somewhere between 10 - 15 megatons of force. That is 1,000 time more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima but only 40% as powerful as the Tsar Bomb, the largest thermonuclear device ever tested.

An area a little smaller than Luxembourg or Rhode Island, 850 square miles or 2,200 square kilometers, was flatten or severely damaged. The asteroid itself exploded 3 to 6 miles, or 5 to 10 kilometers, above the ground.

No impact crater was found. Trees at the ground zero were standing upright though scorched to the point where they looked like a forest of telephone poles. Approximately 80 million trees were knocked down. The shock wave didn't create a pattern of concentric rings but would have looked like a giant spread out butterfly. If this had happened over a large metropolitan area we might be talking about the largest natural disaster in human history instead of an enigmatic event that was long ago and far away.

 

In one happy condolence between the Tunguska event and the meteor crash near Chelyabinsk is no one was killed. The meteor near Celyabinsk was much smaller and it exploded with only the force of 10 - 20 kilotons. Even if those estimates are revised upwards it will still be only tiny fraction of the force expended at Tunguska.

Chelyabinsk was a top secret nuclear research center similar to Los Alamos New Mexico. The city was closed to foreigners until 1992 and the region was the site of a nuclear accident in 1957. Because of Cold War secrecy the accident wasn't public knowledge until almost twenty years after the fact. Today the city's biggest export is professional hockey players.

The 1927 expedition to Tunguska, sponsored by the Russian Academy of Science never found any significant fragments of the meteor. Dense dust clouds after the explosion acted as a mirror reflecting sunlight from over the horizon back down to Earth. The eerie afterglow of the late summer sun radiated out across the northern half of eastern Asia.  In 1908 the Wilson Observatory was able to measure an increase in suspended atmospheric dust that lasted several months after the event. Trace amounts of Iridium blanket the area but it seems the final remains of the entire meteor are little more than dust.

With the lack of data come speculation. One of the most famous and audacious theories came from Eric von Daniken in his book In Search Of Ancient Astronauts. On a few flimsy scrapes of evidence Von Daniken build up a story of a space attempting to make a crash landing. That's how the Tunguska event has become the Russian Roswell. As science has shed some light on what happened counter claims of cover-up and conspiracy have arisen.     

 

Other fringe theories have put out the idea that the meteor was a natural hydrogen bomb. That deuterium in the meteor under heat pressure triggered a thermonuclear explosion. Other scientists have responded that it sounds like physics -but not as we know it.

 

Also proposed was a miniature black hole pasted through our atmosphere. An idea that make Von Daniken's spaceship sound plausible.

In some ways the very diversity of ideas suggests how much about the Tunguska event is not understood and how difficult it is to explain a very complex phenomenon that is on the boundary line of both scientific investigation and folklore. What we saw last weekend over Chelyabinsk will hopefully well us more of what occurred over a hundred years ago and 1,500 miles, 2,000 kilometers, to the east at Tunguska.

Harrison just sent me this. The only way I see this as funny is that I know both Harrison and Davis Chepelle were being ironic