Posted on 06/29/2008 5:31:18 PM PDT by Grammar Nazi
PARIS (AFP) — A hundred years ago this week, a gigantic explosion ripped open the dawn sky above the swampy taiga forest of western Siberia, leaving a scientific riddle that endures to this day.
A dazzling light pierced the heavens, preceding a shock wave with the power of a thousand atomic bombs which flattened 80 million trees in a swathe of more than 2,000 square kilometres (800 square miles).
Evenki nomads recounted how the blast tossed homes and animals into the air. In Irkutsk, 1,500 kilometres (950 miles) away, seismic sensors registered what was initially deemed to be an earthquake. The fireball was so great that a day later, Londoners could read their newspapers under the night sky.
What caused the so-called Tunguska Event, named after the Podkamennaya Tunguska river near where it happened, has spawned at least a half a dozen theories.
(Excerpt) Read more at afp.google.com ...
We now know it was global warming.
ping for one or all of you gentlemen..
Pod people?
Ga'ould mothership?
shape-shifting triffids?
The arrival of the Mother Ship.
The Methane release theory does not jive with the fact that there has never been any kind of similar (smaller) release of Methane that exploded ever recorded. If the process was possible, we would have evidence of other events ocurring in the last 100 years (even if they are a million times smaller than this event.)
If you’ve ever seen what hyper-velocity long-rod penetrators do to tank armor it isn’t that hard to picture something like the Tunguska event being mainly a result of speed of impact of whatever was involved.
The Blast Flattened Over 80 Million Trees
I'm just glad it hit out in the middle of nowhere in Siberia, instead of in a populated area.
I also read that Nikola Tesla was working on something like what you said. Now we have the HAARP array in Alaska. Hmmmmm.
g in AZ
The area is very hard to access, but the first expedition got there by 1927 (the link about how they got there is quite interesting.) They found *nothing* except traces of an airburst. Since then many expeditions from all over the world traveled there, now expecting to find microscopic particles of the impactor, and not a solid meteorite as the earlier scientists believed. Besides, after 1945 people learned what a multi-kiloton explosion can do, and how it looks like on the ground. (Tunguska event is estimated at 10 to 15 megaton.)
For more, Wikipedia seems to have plenty of material.
It would have taken 1% of the earth's magnetic charge to do what happened in Siberia. Tesla's tower did not have that capacity.
--from Wizard, The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, Biography of a Genius.
BTW great read!
Lord, it was a pod full of commies/socies/liberals/demonrats, and they killed the Tzar and millions of others.
Oops - misread headline and thought it was about Yakov Smirnoff...
Too bad we can’t bottle this up and drop one each on Tehran, Damascus and Riyadh.
related, previously posted:
Tunguska, A Century Later
Science News | 6-5-2008 | Sid Perkins
Posted on 06/09/2008 12:44:01 PM PDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2028449/posts
Planetary science: Tunguska at 100
Nature News | 25 June 2008 | Duncan Steel
Posted on 06/25/2008 8:30:57 PM PDT by neverdem
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2036546/posts
Oh, look — some moron put “callingartbell” into the keywords! What a complete a-hole!
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