[Dio]

The Tunguska explosion – 100 years on from devastating impact




By ALAN PICKUP
IT WAS 100 years ago this June that the Earth was rocked by its most violent impact in recent history. And it was sheer luck that it occurred over a remote area of Siberia and led to no known loss of human life.
Even so, the explosion did destroy more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest near the Tunguska River and throw enough dust into the upper atmosphere to light up our summer nights for weeks. No-one reached the epicentre for another 13 years, but theADVERTISEMENTinvestigations and theories have continued ever since.

We now believe that the dazzling fireball that streaked north-westwards across the Siberian sky on the morning of 30 June, 1908, had at its heart a small asteroid, no more than a few tens of metres across. As this ploughed into the atmosphere at perhaps 30km per second, the heat and stresses became so great that it detonated with the force of five megatons of TNT while it was five to ten kilometres above the ground.

The detonation felled trees in a radial pattern, though those directly beneath had only their branches blown off, leaving their trunks standing like a vast field of telegraph poles. With no obvious crater on the ground, it seems that the asteroid was pulverised almost instantly into pebbles and dust.

It is also believed that the asteroid was a piece of Comet Encke, following the comet's orbit in the stream of meteoroids that produce the annual Beta Taurids meteor shower, one that occurs mainly in daylight and is usually only "seen" by radar. Few asteroids as small as the Tunguska impactor are ever spotted by the surveys being made for "near-Earth objects" but they must be plentiful and we might expect similar impact events every 100 to 1,000 years.

Our June nights are characterised by night-long twilight and, if we are lucky, by the silvery-blue glow of noctilucent clouds. Literally "night-shining", these form at altitudes near 82 km, where they catch the sunlight long after our more familiar clouds are in darkness. June and July are their peak months and Scotland sits at just the right latitude to view them – wait for about one hour after sunset and scan the lower reaches of the northern quarter of the sky. Often tenuous and lacy in appearance, they sometimes take on a rippled or herring-bone pattern.

Believed to consist of ice particles around motes of dust, they appear to have increased in frequency over recent decades, perhaps because of growing pollution.

The Sun is furthest north of the equator at 00:59 BST on 21 June, the moment of the summer solstice. In the middle of that night the Sun stands only 10.6° below the northern horizon for Edinburgh, not enough for the sky to be officially dark. The persistent twilight swamps the fainter stars, but from further north, where the dip of the Sun is even less below the horizon, the twilight may hide all but the brighter stars.

Sunrise/sunset times for Edinburgh change from 04:35/21:47 BST on the 1st to 04:27/22:03 on the 21st and 04:31/22:02 BST on the 30th. The Moon is new on the 3rd, at first quarter on the 10th, full on the 18th and at last quarter on the 26th.

Unless you are a keen solar observer, June can be a fallow month for astronomy from our latitudes. Most nebulae are overwhelmed by the twilight, though M13, the glorious globular cluster of stars in Hercules, is in prime position high on the meridian at our star map times. This ball of 100,000 stars some 25,100 light years away appears as a fuzzy blob through binoculars and will still be on show to be glimpsed by the naked eye after the twilight subsides in August.

Just above our southern horizon, and with its red colour accentuated in the twilight, is the supergiant Antares in Scorpius, which lies close the Moon on the night of the 16th. Three nights later the Moon stands below-right of Jupiter, now our brightest night-time object after the Moon as it edges westwards in the constellation Sagittarius. The planet rises above Edinburgh's south-eastern horizon at 00:23 BST on the 1st and by 22:20 on the 30th, but climbs no more than 12° high in the south three hours after the map times. It is too low in the sky to get a clear view but telescopes show its disk swell from 45 to 47 arcseconds in diameter as it brightens a little from magnitude -2.6 to -2.7.

The only other planet visible at our map times at present is Saturn, which shines at magnitude 0.7 only 2.7° above-left of Regulus in Leo and is now creeping away from the star as they sink the lower in the western evening twilight. We can still find them some 20° high as the sky darkens, but this is down below 10° by the month's end.

Mars lies almost 20° to the right of Saturn and Regulus tonight and is a few degrees lower in the sky to the left of the Praesepe star cluster in Cancer. A little fainter than Regulus, it fades slightly from magnitude 1.5 to 1.6 this month as its speeds eastwards into Leo to lie only 0.8° north of Regulus by the 30th. Look for the young Moon almost in line with Saturn and Regulus, and 11° to the left of Mars on the evening of the 8th.

Neither Mercury nor Venus will be seen this month. Mercury navigates between the Earth and the Sun as it passes through inferior conjunction on the 7th, while Venus reaches superior conjunction on the Sun's far side two days later.

[fightingrabbit]

I remeber reading about an unexplained explosion some part of the earth, that destroyed everything in a couple hundred mile radius.

Supposedly a man named Nikola Tesla forewarned people he was going to make it happen. Its real real trippy. i dunno if this is the same case.

[PornoSatan]

Yeah this is a real interesting story that gives some idea of the impact a small asteroid or comet (still being argued as to which it was as far as I know) has on the Earth.

[darthdad]

According to Ray Stantz, it was supernatural.

[WrestlingNerd]

No it was an alien spacecraft!

[fightingrabbit]

yeah Dio. I went back and read about it. and one of the theories was that Nikola Tesla honed a death ray and blew up that part of earth. He even said himself he could harness enough energy to do it. I wouldnt rule it out as a theory..

"If you want to get weird without leaving the confines of the earth, you can always go with the death ray theory, which argues that the Tunguska blast was caused by Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-born pioneer who made major contributions to harnessing the power of electricity.


Unlike most of the above notions, the Tesla death ray notion has a few documented facts to back it up. At almost the exact time of the Tunguska blast, Tesla was experimenting with an invention known as the Tesla Coil.

According to the story (which is better documented than mini-black holes, just for instance), Tesla was attempting to use his Coil to broadcast a transmission to the Arctic Circle by dumping massive amounts of electricity into the earth itself. Tesla theorized that the earth would conduct the electricity as what he called "terrestrial waves." The experiment ended when the amount of current he used caused a nearby generator to blow up amid a violent and apparently man-made lightning storm.

While the timing of the experiment is interesting, and the geographical locations are suggestive, the Tesla death ray theory still lacks a coherent scientific scenario which could have caused the wanton destruction witnessed in Tunguska. There are also those pesky eyewitness reports of something falling from the sky. On the other hand, lightning is often perceived as falling from the sky when it actually leaps up from the ground."

Very trippy. And much more plausible than an alien spacecraft. I really think Nikola caused it to happen. Yet it'll always be unexplainable. Its just a trippy thought that someone would possessed intelligence that he had the power to destroy planet earth on his own.

[MicroBrew]

Saw a documentary which mirrored the OP's article. I am sticking with this explanation, the most rational one yet.

[gasguzzler]

Originally Posted by MicroBrew

Saw a documentary which mirrored the OP's article. I am sticking with this explanation, the most rational one yet.

I agree. The most logical solution usually is the correct solution. However, knowing what I know about Tesla, I wouldn't be surprised AT ALL if it was later revealed that it was actually one of his projects.

[Lagrange]

Originally Posted by gasguzzler

I agree. The most logical solution usually is the correct solution. However, knowing what I know about Tesla, I wouldn't be surprised AT ALL if it was later revealed that it was actually one of his projects.

Tesla was the mysterious scientist played by David Bowie in The Prestige. And I doubt whether the explosion was due to one of his devices. This is just one of those legends that have accumulated around a person whom many consider to be a "spaceman"-type genius who conceived of ideas, inventions and scientific theories that were far ahead of his time.

[fightingrabbit]

Originally Posted by gasguzzler

I agree. The most logical solution usually is the correct solution. However, knowing what I know about Tesla, I wouldn't be surprised AT ALL if it was later revealed that it was actually one of his projects.

i dont know anything about Tesla. But if the reports are true and theres was proof and documents that he was experimenting with the Coil around the exact time the explosion happened. Then it just seems like too much of a coincedence that a meteor would strike right when hes screwing around and surging massive electrical currents into the Earth. Theres no doubt in my mind that he had the brain to do it. He was a genius. They know how to do that kind of shit.

Originally Posted by Lagrange

Tesla was the mysterious scientist played by David Bowie in The Prestige. And I doubt whether the explosion was due to one of his devices. This is just one of those legends that have accumulated around a person whom many consider to be a "spaceman"-type genius who conceived of ideas, inventions and scientific theories that were far ahead of his time.

thats the thing though. Nikola wasnt a movie character or an actor. He was real life scientist/genius. And he DID invent stuff that was ahead of his time, aka the Tesla Coil. Thats why i think it was unexplainable at the time. Because who back then woulda even fathomed someone could harness the power of electricity let alone focus all its energy into one place. Entirely plausible in present day.