100 years on, mystery shrouds Tunguska event

A hundred years ago this week, a gigantic explosion ripped open the dawn sky above the swampy taiga forest of western Siberia, leaving a scientific riddle that endures to this day. A dazzling light pierced the heavens, preceding a shock wave with the power of a thousand atomic bombs which flattened 80 million trees in a swathe of more than 2,000 square kilometres (800 square miles).

Evenki nomads recounted how the blast tossed homes and animals into the air.

View: Full Article | Source: Yahoo! News

happy "fall on Earth and make a big **** hole" week to everyone!

happy "fall on Earth and make a big **** hole" week to everyone!

LOL! That's one way of expressing it.

wow ive never heard of that happaning, as usual

i saw on tv somewhere that an alien ship exploding was a possible, though probably not probable, theory

The "frozen ice dirt-ball" comet theory doesn't explain the scorched trees (about 50 kilometres (30 miles) across) stripped of their bark?

The "frozen ice dirt-ball" comet theory doesn't explain the scorched trees (about 50 kilometres (30 miles) across) stripped of their bark?

according to link, comets can be composed of large quantities of methane, which is a highly flammable gas.

excerpt:

Response #: 2 of 2

Author: hawley

Comets are thought to be "dirty snowballs" composed mostly of water ice and

methane ice. They travel at speeds around 20,000 MPH.

according to link, comets can be composed of large quantities of methane, which is a highly flammable gas.

excerpt:

Lets say thats true. Did it explode before or on impact?

Because early investigations to the site by scientists claimed that there was no impact crater of any kind.

I read another theory of meteoroid airbursts creating a shock wave blast pattern?

Here's a link to a Russian perspective on Tunguska:

http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries...5625-tunguska-0

Cz

Here's a link to a Russian perspective on Tunguska:

http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries...5625-tunguska-0

cz

I wouldn really trust any pravda links.

I hadn't heard of the "methane seeping from below" theory until I read this article. Add it to the list: comet, meteor, crash-landing UFO, mini black hole, etc. etc.

I wouldn really trust any pravda links.

I'm not saying I trust it implicitly... just providing it as another point of view.

Cz

Could a military experiment be a pssobility? Maybe a failed one.

There was definitely an X-files episode about Tunguska in season 4. Mulder and Krycek ended up in a Russian concentration camp-type thing because they dared to investigate the area xD

Could a military experiment be a pssobility? Maybe a failed one.

Thats what I first thought...but in 1908?

Lake Cheko does not have the typical round shape of an impact crater, and no extraterrestrial material has been found, which means "there's got to be a terrestrial explanation," Wolfgang Kundt, a physicist at Germany's Bonn University told the British weekly.

Correct... the lake is not round. Its an oval, the exact shape that a "space rock" hitting the surface at an angle makes. And on top of that, the lake is shaped like a cone, its a perfect impact crater.

For one study, a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory recreated what the Martian surface would have looked like before the volcanoes formed using gravity and surface measurements from spacecraft. They determined the impact basin is oval-shaped, similar to what would be expected if a space object had hit at an angle.

"The shape is really one of the key pieces of evidence that it was probably formed in a giant impact," said MIT postdoctoral researcher Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, whose original "gut feeling" favored the other theory.

*gasp* They think the Borealis Basin is an impact crater because its an oval shape!?

Correct... the lake is not round. Its an oval, the exact shape that a "space rock" hitting the surface at an angle makes. And on top of that, the lake is shaped like a cone, its a perfect impact crater.

This article talks a bit about Lake Cheko, and other things related to Tunguska:

Fire in the sky: Tunguska at 100

By Paul Rincon

Science reporter, BBC News

At 7:17am on 30 June 1908, an immense explosion tore through the forest of central Siberia.

Some 80 million trees were flattened over an area of 2,000 square km (800 square miles) near the Tunguska River.

The blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and generated a shock wave that knocked people to the ground 60km from the epicentre.

The cause was an asteroid or comet just a few tens of metres across which detonated 5-10km above the ground, 100 years ago today.

Eyewitnesses recalled a brilliant fireball resembling a "flying star" ploughing across the cloudless June sky at an oblique angle.

Tunguska reminds us that these impact events have occurred in the relatively recent past

Prof Richard Crowther, STFC

The plume of hot dust trailing the fireball gave rise to descriptions of a "pillar of fire", which was quickly replaced by a giant cloud of black smoke rising over the horizon.

"The sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest. The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire," one local remembered.

"At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it, as if my shirt was on fire… I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky slammed shut. A strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards."

This eyewitness was lucky, but an elderly hunter who was much closer to the explosion died after being flung against a tree by the blast. That the airburst did not cause more casualties was in large part due to the remoteness of the area.

Bright light

To many, this event - the biggest space impact of modern times - serves as a reminder of the continuing threat posed to our planet by objects from space.

If the Tunguska "impactor" had exploded over a major city such as London, the death toll would have been up in the millions.

"Everything within the M25 would have been wiped out," Dr Mark Bailey, director of the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland, told BBC News.

The effects of Tunguska were not limited to Siberia. In London, it was possible to read newspapers and play cricket outdoors at midnight. This is now thought to have been due to sunlight scattered by dust from the fireball's plume.

The Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik visited the region in 1921, interviewed local eyewitnesses and soon realised that a meteorite must have been the cause.

He persuaded the Russian authorities to fund an expedition to the region in 1927, during which he was able to explore the vast zones of fallen trees.

An aerial survey was carried out in 1938, revealing how the flattened trees were angled away from the epicentre of the explosion over a 50km-wide zone which formed a butterfly shape. Trees at the epicentre were charred and stripped of their branches and bark, but were left standing, which would lead to them being coined "telegraph poles".

Some researchers think a comet would have been too fragile to have caused the Tunguska event, and that an asteroid is therefore the most likely candidate.

But Mark Bailey thinks some comets could contain chunks of tough material that could survive the plunge through Earth's atmosphere.

Meteor shower

Indeed, one theory proposes that the Tunguska object was a fragment of Comet Encke. This ball of ice and dust is responsible for a meteor shower called the Beta Taurids, which cascade into Earth's atmosphere in late June and July - the time of the Tunguska event.

The absence of any crater connected with the Tunguska event has left the door open for some outlandish alternatives to the meteorite theory. A lump of anti-matter, a colliding black hole and - inevitably - an exploding alien spaceship have all been proposed as the possible source of the blast.

But in 2007, Giuseppe Longo, from the University of Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues, suggested they might have found something Leonid Kulik had missed all those years ago.

Lake Cheko does not appear on any maps of the area made before 1908; it also happens to lie North-West-West of the epicentre, on the general path taken by the impactor as it plummeted to Earth.

To Dr Longo, a radar signal from beneath the lake is suggestive of a dense object, possibly part of the Tunguska meteorite, buried about 10m down. The team plans to conduct an expedition to the area in 2009, to investigate this possibility.

"We have no positive proof it is an impact crater, we have come to this conclusion [about Lake Cheko] through the negation of other hypotheses," Dr Longo told BBC News last year.

But other researchers, including Gareth Collins and Phil Bland of Imperial College London, cast doubt on the idea Lake Cheko has anything to do with the Tunguska event.

They point to trees older than 100 years which are still standing around the rim of the lake (and, they say, should have been levelled by the impact) and the features of the lake itself, which, the researchers argue, are inconsistent with an impact origin.

Full Article

Cz

This article talks a bit about Lake Cheko, and other things related to Tunguska:

Nice find, thanks.

according to link, comets can be composed of large quantities of methane, which is a highly flammable gas.

excerpt:

Don't you think the methane gas would have burn almost immediately after entering our atmosphere rather than wait 'til it was near the earth's crust??? just a suggestion!

I wouldn really trust any pravda links.

[/quote

When it comes to unsolved mysteries, I will trust the Pravda any (of the old soviet) day than the media of the good US of A... who print only was they deem useful to their own interests.

Thats what I first thought...but in 1908?

Tesla was born in 1856, so anything is possible

Tesla was born in 1856, so anything is possible

I agree with you.I found an article wich tells how Tesla was testing his Death Ray.

Here it is.

edit: double post,sorry.

You know, I was watching a program about The Tunguska event. One night. And I thought it was interesting.

I don't think a spaceship exploded in midair. It could have been a rock entering the planet and somehow exploded.