Fire in the sky: Tunguska at 100

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This is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event! From the BBC: Fire in the sky: Tunguska at 100.

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. [continue]

There’s lots more at Wikipedia, of course, including this delightful quotation:

Perhaps the earliest widely-held theory for the Tunguska explosion was that the world was about to end. As the minutes passed, this theory was dropped in favour of other, less final theories, until today one is hard-pressed to find anyone who truly believes the world ended on the morning of 30 June 1908.

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One thought on “Fire in the sky: Tunguska at 100”

  1. I’d love to know what is the composition (and thereby origin) of the hard reflective item at the bottom of funnel-shaped Lake Cheko. It might answer a lot of questions.

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