Tunguska blast still a mystery 100 years on

I’m fascinated by this strange event.  Very cool. :sunglasses:

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) – It produced a blast hundreds of times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb, was seen hundreds of miles away and narrowly missed obliterating an entire city – but 100 years to the week after the mysterious explosion in Siberia, no one is any closer to understanding what caused it.
Millions of trees were destroyed by the Tunguska blast.

Despite countless investigations, the so-called Tunguska Event remains one of the 20th century’s greatest enigmas – seized upon by mystics, UFO enthusiasts and scientists as evidence of angry gods, extraterrestrial life or the impending threat of a cosmic collision.

But says Stanislav Krivyakov, who has spent the past 35 years investigating the Siberian blast, despite intense interest in the event – which has featured in several episodes of the X-Files – no conclusive evidence has been found to support any theory.

“There are many people who build their hypotheses based on scanty information,” he told CNN.

“But there are many aspects to the phenomenon that don’t fit any standards or analogies. In everything about it we find something complicated, problematic, vague. It’s truly out of the ordinary.”

Deepening the mystery was the delay in a full investigation into the event, which occurred as Russia was entering the years of upheaval that surrounded the communist revolution.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/07/04/tunguska.anniversary/index.html

The Tunguska Event
At 7:17 in the morning on June 30th, 1908, a huge explosion occurred several miles in the air above the Tunguska region of Siberia, with the force of a large nuclear blast. It was probably a small asteroid or comet. The extreme heat generated by the object entering our atmosphere caused it to violently disintegrate before hitting the ground. Witnesses hundreds of miles away reported that it was brighter than the Sun. Even at that distance, the shockwave knocked people down, ruining their breakfast. The explosion destroyed 60 million trees.

Nineteen years elapsed before Russian scientists got around to investigating the site of the impact. This was partially due to the extreme remoteness of Siberia, but also because of a long term, highly coordinated mass procrastination experiment that was already in progress.

The scientists persuaded the government to fund the expedition, based on the assumption that iron from the meteorite could be retrieved and used by Soviet industry. Because the explosion occurred in mid air, no meteorite was found, but the scientists were able to bring back large quantities of fresh Tunguska, which is quite delicious on toast.

Although impact events like these are statistically quite improbable, there is nevertheless a small possibility that at any moment, without warning, the city that you live in could be completely wiped out by a big rock from space.

Sleep well, my friend.

This looks interesting…

getontheblast.com/tblast.html