Free Republic

Asteroid Day this year, June 30, 2021, is 113 years after the Tunguska impact event in Siberia, which destroyed an area of pristine forest the size of Tokyo. With blasted and burnt tree trunks leveled and stripped bare over such a vast area, it is as though a large atomic bomb had been dropped on the forest. The debate still goes on in the research literature, but a popular theory is that this impact was caused by a small comet fragment, in the region of 328 feet (100 meters) in diameter, that exploded at an altitude of around 5 miles...

On the morning of 30 June 1908, a large explosion occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia. That event is known as the Tunguska event that leveled trees across more than 2,000 square kilometers. It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found. Due to the remoteness of the site and the limited instrumentation available at the time of the event, modern scientific interpretations of its cause and magnitude have relied chiefly on damage assessments, and geological studies conducted many years after the fact. The most likely cause...

Humans have good reason to fear comets, asteroids and other massive space objects. Now we’d like to add ‘mini-moons’ to the list of heavenly bodies we should be worried about. Scientists have claimed our planet was recently hit by one of these mysterious rocks, which exploded in a gigantic fireball. A mini-moon is an object which becomes entangled in Earth’s orbit as it’s zooming through space. It will either whirl around the planet harmlessly forever, zoom off back off on its journey through the solar system or, in the worst case, smash into our planet. ‘Objects gravitationally captured by the...

Sunday is International Asteroid Day, commemorating the Earth's largest recorded asteroid impact while focusing on the real danger of asteroids that could collide with Earth. In 1908, a powerful asteroid struck the Podkamennaya Tunguska River area in a remote Siberian forest of Russia. Six years ago, an asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It exploded in the air, releasing 20 to 30 times more energy than that of the first atomic bombs and generating brightness greater than the sun. It damaged more than 7,000 buildings and injured more than 1,000 people. The shock wave broke windows 58 miles away....

Over the next several weeks, our planet will have a close encounter with the Taurid meteor swarm. It will be the closest that we have been to the center of the meteor swarm since 1975, and we won’t have an encounter this close again until 2032. So for astronomers, this is a really big deal. And hopefully there will be no danger to Earth during this pass, but some scientists are absolutely convinced that the Tunguska explosion of 1908 which flattened 80 million trees in Russia was caused by an object from the Taurid meteor swarm. As you will see...

...Blaine Gibson, who has been gathering suspected MH370 debris as it washes up on Madagascar and Mozambique, said Mr Raza had been due to deliver new items to Malaysian investigators in Kuala Lumpur when he was unexpectedly slain. The timing has rattled Mr Gibson, who says he has been receiving death threats because of his self-financed mission to solve the baffling aviation mystery. He had planned to keep details of his latest finds — which included two items he considered particularly promising — under wraps until they had been safely transported off the island but changed his mind after Mr...

“Despite every effort using the best science available, cutting-edge technology, as well as modelling and advice from highly skilled professionals who are the best in their field, unfortunately, the search has not been able to locate the aircraft,” the Joint Agency Coordination Center in Australia said in a statement. “The decision to suspend the underwater search has not been taken lightly nor without sadness,” the agency said. The jet carrying 239 people on board vanished from civilian radar in the early hours of March 8, 2014, without so much as a distress call from its pilots. After several false starts,...

Blaine Alan Gibson has been called a modern-day Indiana Jones – though in temperament he’s probably a lot closer to Sherlock Holmes. Blaine Alan Gibson has been called a modern-day Indiana Jones – though in temperament he’s probably a lot closer to Sherlock Holmes. Gibson, 59, made headlines around the world earlier this year after he found debris from a Boeing 777 that was later confirmed to be a piece of the infamous Malaysia flight 370 aircraft, which went missing shortly after take-off on 8 March 2014 with 239 people on board. After diligently working to transfer the panel to...

Charred debris, possibly belonging to the missing MH370 plane, has been handed to investigators - raising the prospect of a flash fire on board the ill-fated jet. An American amateur investigator handed over several pieces of blackened debris to Australia's Transport Safety Bureau on Monday in what may prove to be a breakthrough in one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history. Blaine Gibson said the material, which had washed up in Madagascar, included what appeared to be an internal panel.

FULL TITLE:UFO landing site? Meteorite crater? Scientists baffled by gigantic 262ft hole that has appeared at Siberia's 'End of The World' Enormous crater appears suddenly in part of Russia whose name translates as 'the end of the world' Teams of scientists are rushing east to fathom the cause of this unusual - and rare - geographical occurrence One especially outlandish theory talks about a UFO landing as a possible cause of this colossal chasm in the earth An urgent expedition will leaves tomorrow to probe a giant crater that has appeared in gas-rich northern Siberia. Extraordinary aerial images show a...

Sam RoJune 30, 2014 Today is the 106th anniversary of a historic explosion that still has no clear explanation. It happened in Tunguska, a remote forest area in the middle of Siberia. The blast had the power of 15 megatons of TNT, roughly a thousand times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima Japan. The event was so powerful that it was felt and heard a thousand miles away. Locals believed the blast was supernatural, caused by a god that was punishing people for their wickedness. Scientists, on the other hand, believed it was a meteor. Here's Where It...

Chelyabinsk, a large city in western Russia, was best known for producing tractors and professional hockey players until the morning of February 15, 2013, when a 19-meter-wide meteor screamed through the sky and exploded with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT. The meteor generated a fireball many times brighter than the sun, so powerful it even caused sunburns. The shock wave blew out windows and knocked residents off of their feet, injuring more than 1,200. The object was the largest to strike Earth in more than a century... Asteroids that come within 28 million miles of our planet are...

Pravda.RU:Top Stories:More in detail 15:33 2003-03-18Very Large Meteorite Fell Down in Siberia The falling of the meteorite is still mysterious. Scientists say that it might weigh 60 tons The night was rather dull in the north-east of the Russian Irkutsk region on September 25, 2002. All of a sudden, night turned into day. A very bright glow covered the sky, it was hard to look at it. Those people, who happened to be outside at 2 a.m., saw a ball of fire that was flying very fast across the sky. Weird rusting sounds could be heard. A few seconds...

PARIS, Oct 13: A Russian meteorite that crashed two weeks ago in Siberia, but whose existence is being played down by Russian authorities, is said to be "one of the great events of the century" by French space specialist Antonella Barucci. Miss Barucci, a meteorite specialist employed by the Paris Observatory said that the Russian metorite, which fell October 3 in a remote region of Siberia "could be the largest and most important meteorite to fall on earth since the last one that fell in 1908, also on Siberia." The new Siberian meteorite has also the added attraction, moreover, that...

May 8 2006 12:01PM Chance of asteroids hitting earth very slim - Russian astronomers ST.PETERSBURG/MOSCOW. May 8 (Interfax) - The chance of a large asteroid hitting our planet in the next 100 years is "extremely slim," astronomer Sergei Smirnov of the Pulkovo Main Observatory told journalists. Smirnov dismissed as unfounded reports that a giant asteroid could strike the Earth in the summer of 2008 and said this is clear from experts' calculations. U.S. astronomers have lately been closely monitoring a large newly discovered asteroid, which they said has a very little chance of colliding with the earth. The odds of...

The 1908 explosion over the Tunguska region in Siberia has always been an enigma. While the leading theories of what caused the mid-air explosion are that an asteroid or comet shattered in an airburst event, no reliable trace of such a body has ever been found. But a newly published paper reveals three different potential meteorite fragments found in the sandbars in a body of water in the area, the Khushmo River. While the fragments have all the earmarks of being meteorites from the event – which could potentially solve the 100-year old mystery — the only oddity is that...

comet crashing into the Earth some 13,000 years ago was thought to have spelled doom to a group of early North American people, and possibly the extinction of ice age beasts in the region. But the space rock was wrongly accused, according to a group of 16 scientists in fields ranging from archaeology to crystallography to physics, who have offered counterevidence to the existence of such a collision. Almost 13,000 years ago, a prehistoric Paleo-Indian group known as the Clovis culture suffered its demise at the same time the region underwent significant climate cooling known as the Younger Dryas. Animals...

A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal "Science First Hand". The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov explained how...

When archaeologists discovered thousands of medieval skeletons in a mass burial pit in east London in the 1990s, they assumed they were 14th-century victims of the Black Death or the Great Famine of 1315-17. Now they have been astonished by a more explosive explanation – a cataclysmic volcano that had erupted a century earlier, thousands of miles away in the tropics, and wrought havoc on medieval Britons. Scientific evidence – including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one...

What Caused Argentina's Mystery Craters? By Ben Harder for National Geographic News May 9, 2002 For more than a decade, planetary scientists have been puzzling over a mixed bag of meteorite evidence scarring Argentina's plains. They gradually pieced together clues to reconstruct what seemed to be a rough-hewn but generally accurate account of a prehistoric meteorite impact. A mere 10,000 years ago, scientists deduced in the original theory, a sizable meteorite came hurtling through the atmosphere at a bizarrely low angle, smacked the ground with a glancing blow, and broke into numerous pieces that gouged separate, miles-long scars in the...