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One hundred years ago today!

I would like to note that today is the one hundredth anniversary of the Tunguska Event.

You would be forgiven for having not heard of this event or even any idea of where or what a Tunguska is, but it has fascinated me ever since I read about it in the World Book Encyclopaedia as a kid. As an aside, I will admit to dipping into the old encyclopaedia for random reading matter right throughout my childhood (remember kids this is BE time (Before the Internet).

The Tunguska Event was a massive explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in (what is now) Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia during the morning of June 30, 1908. To confuse matters more, we have the lovely quirk of Russian history that records the date as June 17, in the Julian calendar, which was used at the time. Most estimates of the energy of the blast agree on somewhere between ten-to-fifteen megatons of TNT the most likely. This would make it about a thousand times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima

Yet despite the fact that the Tunguska Event is believed to be the largest impact event on land in Earth's recent history, there was little scientific curiosity about the impact at the time, possibly due to the isolation of the region. Compounding the lack of immediate data, any records that were made are likely to have been lost during the following years of tumult in Russia (including little things like World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War).

Yet notwithstanding this – and my ineptitude with many parts of the physical sciences – the event has kept my interest. The first formal expedition that anyone knows about was in 1927, and to their surprise, they couldn’t find a crater. There was instead a region of scorched trees about 50 kilometres across, bear in mind this is nineteen years later! I have included a picture that was taken during the 1927 expedition.



Of course, a number of weird and whacky explanations have also been advanced. Various UFO enthusiasts have claimed that the event was the result of an exploding alien spaceship or even an alien weapon going off to "save the Earth from an imminent threat". Others suggest that a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere may have undergone a nuclear fusion reaction. In the 1970s, some physicists proposed that the Tunguska event was caused by a "small" black hole passing through the Earth. While all of these claims are interesting, the BBC may have spoiled the party in 2001 by claiming to have ‘solved the puzzle’.

Comments

smudgeon said…
I'll admit to being the same kind of nerd who surfed the encycolpedia for interesting stuff to bore my parents with. And Tunguska is one I've always kept in the back of my head. Fascinating stuff. 100 years you say? Feels like yesterday...
stromsjo said…
This is pretty much what astronomer Carl Sagan explained in his Cosmos series.

He also made an interesting analogy for our time of ever-ready rapid-response nuclear weapons. What would happen today if an inexplicable explosion like this happened in the wrong place? Would we instantly self-destruct?

I also find this event fascinating and I wasn't aware of the 100 year anniversary. Thanks!
sam said…
Thank you, a really fascinating post! It's almost a pity when the scientists arrive at an answer, an asteroid like Mathilde is so much less exciting than some of the alien theories!
Z said…
Oh, yes, I remember reading about this and as Per says, maybe even saw Sagan talk about it in his series. Hadn't thought about it in a long time.
Kris McCracken said…
I think that Sagan makes a good point. Another thought concerns just what would have happened if it happen in Moscow, Paris, London, Berlin or New York? Just how would that have changed the history of the twentieth century?

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