Thanks Explorer89.
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Posted on 05/02/2013 3:39:49 PM PDT by BenLurkin
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 the researcher actually found the fragments 25 years ago, and only recently has published his findings.
Like the recent Chelyabinsk airburst event, the Tunguska event likely also produced a shower of fragments from the exploding parent body, scientists have thought. But no convincing evidence has ever been found from the June 30, 1908 explosion that occurred over the Tunguska region. The explosion flattened trees in a 2,000 square kilometer area. Luckily, that region was largely uninhabited, but reportedly one person was killed and there were very few people that reported the explosion. Forensic-like research has determined the blast was 1,000 times more powerful than a nuclear bomb explosion, and it registered 5 on the Richter scale.
Previous expeditions to the region turned up empty as far as finding meteorites; however one expedition in 1939 by Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik found a sample of melted glassy rock containing bubbles, which was considered evidence of an impact event. But the sample was somehow lost and has never undergone modern analysis.
The expedition in 1998 by Andrei Zlobin from the Russian Academy of Sciences was initially unsuccessful in finding meteorites or evidence of impacts.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
I’ve often pondered how history would have been different if this thing had annihilated Moscow — instead of exploding over Siberia.
Or Kenya
If the foolish Germans hadn’t delivered Lenin into Russia — there would never have been a President “Hussein”
lol
Or Mecca.
Or Atlantis.
Oh wait, never mind.
God already gave us a “twofer” when he smoked Sodom & Gomorrah, we can’t expect Him to rain fire on every den of iniquity for us :)
Ping for your list.
They still would have attacked Pearl Harbor...
Being an American, I can visualize miles far better than I can kilometers. I just converted that figure to miles, which (if my math is right) comes out to about 730 square miles.
That's an area over twenty seven miles on a side.
I don't know about you, but getting a picture of something flattening an area that large just boggles my mind. I never had any idea the Tunguska blast was that huge.
I read once that if the object had hit 3 hours later it would have hit St. Petersburg. Tunguska is about the same latitude as St. Petersburg but about 5 degrees further north than Moscow, and St. Petersburg was the capital of the Russian Empire.
730 square miles is about the size of the island of Maui and more than ten times the size of the District of Columbia.
Oh, everyone knows by now that the Tanguska event was actually an extraterrestrial spaceship on a goodwill mission to Earth that inexplicably imploded to critical mass in the fierce overpressure of our lower atmosphere and then detonated with thermonuclear ferocity.
;^)
Personally, I doubt they’ll ever really know what caused that explosion.
That works for me.
I thought that the working theory was that the 13-year-old Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, caused it by an experiment with his chemistry set which went awry.
“At breakfast time I was sitting by the house at Vanavara Trading Post [65 kilometres/40 miles south of the explosion], facing north. [...] I suddenly saw that directly to the north, over Onkoul’s Tunguska Road, the sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest [as Semenov showed, about 50 degrees up—expedition note]. The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn’t bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few metres. I lost my senses for a moment, but then my wife ran out and led me to the house. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the earth shook, and when I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops. Later we saw that many windows were shattered, and in the barn a part of the iron lock snapped.”
A quote from wiki. Pretty wild.
Freegards
Well then. I guess a Tunguska sized meteor blast over DC would just about cure all our ills, eh?
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