Tunguska Event

Tunguska Event

In the early morning hours of June 30, 1908, in Central Siberia, a giant fireball was seen moving rapidly across the sky. Where it touched the horizon, an enormous explosion took place. It leveled some 2,000 square kilometers of forest and burned thousands of trees in a flash fire near the impact site. It produce3d an atmospheric shock wave that twice circled the Earth. For two days afterward, there was so much fine dust in the atmosphere that one could read a newspaper at night by scattered light in the streets of London, 10,000 kilometers away.

The government of Russia under the Czars could not be bothered to investigate so trivial an event, which, after all, had occurred far away, among the backward Tungus people of Siberia. It was ten years after the Revolution before an expedition arrived to examine the ground and interview the witnesses. These are some of the accounts they brought back:

Early in the morning, when everyone was asleep in the tent, it was blown up into the air, together with the occupants. When they fell back to Earth, the whole family suffered slight bruises, but Akulina and Ivan actually lost consciousness. When they regained consciousness they heard a great deal of noise and saw the forest blazing round them and much of it devastated.

I was sitting in the porch of the house at the trading station of Vanovara at breakfast time and looking towards the north. I had just raised my axe to hoop a cask, when suddenly… the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared to be covered with fire. At that moment I felt a great heat as if my shirt had caught fire. I wanted to pull off my short and throw it away, but at that moment there was a bang in the sky, and a might crash was heard. I was thrown on the ground about three sajenes away from the porch and for a moment I lost consciousness. My wife ran out and carried me into the hut. The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky or guns firing. The Earth trembled and when I lay on the ground I covered my head because I was afraid that stones might hit it. At that moment, when the sky opened, a hot wind, as from a cannon, blew past the huts from the north. It left its mark on the ground.

Tunguska Event: A giant fireball explosed in the air, it’s all we are certain about it. Image: Princess and Butterfly Wings on Mythical Horse by © Megan (Elena)

When I sat down to have my breakfast beside my plough, I heard sudden bangs, as if from gun-fire. My horse fell to its knees. From the north side above the forest a flame shot up… Then I saw that the fir forest had been bent over by the wind and I thought of a hurricane. I seized hold of my plough with both hands, so that I would not be carried away. The wind was so strong that it carried off some of the soil from the surface of the ground, and then the hurricane drove a wall of water up the Angara. I saw it all quite clearly, because my land was on a hillside.

The roar frightened the horses to such an extent that some galloped off in panic, dragging the ploughs in different directions, and others collapsed.

The carpenters, after the first and second crashes, had crossed themselves in stupefaction, and when the third crash resounded, they fell backwards from the building onto the chips of wood. Some of them were so stunned and utterly terrified that I had to calm them down and reassure them. We all abandoned work and went into the village. There, whole crowds of local inhabitants were gathered in the streets in terror, talking about this phenomenon.

I was in the fields… and had only just got one horse harnessed to the harrow and begun to attach another when suddenly I heard what sounded like a single loud shot to the right. I immediately turned round and saw an elongated flaming object flying through the sky. The front part was much broader than the tall end and its color was like fire in the day-time. It was many times bigger than the Sun, but much dimmer, so that it was possible to look at it with the naked eye. Behind the flames trailed what looked like dust. It was wreathed in little puffs, and blue streamers were left behind from the flames… As soon as the flame had disappeared, bangs louder than shots from a gun were heard, the ground could be felt to tremble, and the window panes in the cabin were shattered.

I was washing wool on the bank of the River Kan. Suddenly a noise like a fluttering of the wings of a frightened bird was heard… and a kind of swell came up the river. After this came a single sharp bang so loud than one of the workmen fell into the water.

This remarkable occurrence is called the Tunguska Event. Some scientists have suggested that it was caused by a piece of hurtling antimatter, annihilated on contact with the ordinary matter of the Earth, disappearing in a flash of gamma rays. But the absence of radioactivity at the impact site gives no support to this explanation. Other postulate than a mini black hole passed through the Earth in Siberia and out the other side. But the records of atmospheric shock waves show no hint of an object booming out of the North Atlantic later that day.

Perhaps it was a spaceship of some unimaginably advanced extraterrestrial civilization in desperate mechanical trouble, crashing in a remote region of an obscure planet. But at the site of the impact there is no trace of such a ship. Each of these ideas has been proposed, some of them more or less seriously. Not one of them is strongly supported by the evidence.

The key point of the Tunguska Event is that there was a tremendous explosion, a great shock wave, an enormous forest fire, and yet there is no impact crater at the site. There seems to be only one explanation consistent with all the facts: In 1908 a piece of comet hit the Earth.