109 Years After The Tunguska Impact Event: One Event, Many Explanations

109 years ago in the year 1908 in the month of June, it was just another great morning in the remote Podkamennaya Tunguska River, a place in Siberia an event occurred that had kept the scientists intrigued to this day.

A man sitting 40 miles away at Vanavara Siberia in Russia that morning felt violent after effect shock waves of the impact that happened at Tunguska River. He was forcefully thrown off his chair and the intense heat that followed made his shirt appear to be set on fire.

The explosion ripped through the air in a fireball. The size of which ranged between 50 to 100m in width. The earth vibrated, and windows smashed some 35 miles (60 km) away.

A Forest of Telephone Poles

^{[Wikipedia, Public Domain by Vokrug Sveta]Source: Tunguska Forest}

The blast chared about eighty million trees, stripping them of their branches giving them the eerie effects of a forest filled with telephone poles.

The charred trees looked as if an atomic bomb went off.

But this atomic bomb's explosion was so massive that it was equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs. People felt the shock waves in the distant location like in places like the UK.

The net energy released was between 10-15 megatons of TNT which was regarded by some as a conservative estimate. In all, it was the most powerful phenomenon of its like in history

But luckily, there was no human casualty except for an unlucky elderly hunter according to this report.

The major casualties were the 80 million trees covering an area of 2,000 square kilometres (800 square miles) around the Tunguska River and hundreds of charred carcasses of reindeers. That was due to the sparse human population in this area.

What caused such a devasting powerful explosion?

The answer you get is dependent on who you ask. It has been 116 years, and still, the answers you get remains very varied. The majority think it has to do with comets and asteroids, while there are others who feel its extraterrestrial activities bothering on aliens and UFOs.

This lack of answers may not be unconnected to how the Russian authorities handled the initial investigation of the explosion.

Scientific proof of what happened was the last thing on the authorities minds. Their plate was full as they were handling political upheavals as the Russian Revolution followed a few years away. The World One also was also around the corner.

An official investigation into what happened that night started nineteen years later in 1927 with the Russian researchers led by Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik.

Let us start with the famous explanation of what happened that Tuesday morning at Tunguska.

The Meteors Did It

This answer was one of the most popular explanations for what happened that morning of June 30 in 1908 at Tunguska.

The Russian mineralogist, Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik, in 1927 was the first to drive the science community in the direction of the meteors as he researches the difficult terrain of the impact area. The flattened trees that spread over an area of about 31 miles all give him a clue a meteor smashed and exploded there.

But one thing puzzled him- there was no crater, a big hole formed when meteors slam into earth. Also, there were no meteoric remnants to act as evidence.

But Kulik has an explanation for all these; soft swampy ground can easily hide debris. Kulik writes this concluding article as he winds up his investigation on May 12, 1937, with this article here.

It is necessary to complete this factual account of this fall my conclusions of a theoretical nature based on considerations of matters of vital interest. We know on June 30, 1908, behind [the] Podkamennaya Tunguska, an enormous iron meteorite fell. We may imagine that this body broke into pieces, first in the air and then in the Earth's crust...We should expect to encounter at a depth of hardly less than 25 meters, crushed masses of this nickeliferous iron, individual pieces of which may weigh one or two hundred tons ^{The Meteorite of June 30, 1908, in Central Siberia p.78}

Oh, wait..It was the comets!

But some researchers later said that it was the comet that crashed hence the lack of remnants. Ice constitutes the major part of a comet as opposed to that of the meteors that are majorly composed of rock. An explanation which justifies the Kulik's inability to find rocks: ice melts.

You will think that is just the end of it. The problem is now solved, we could all go on our merry way. But that is not what is going to happen as many others have other ideas.

A death from another angle?

While many scientists have their eyes up looking at the various explanation of what brought about the blast, an Astrophysicist from Germany has other ideas. Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kundt of the University of Bonn proposed that tectonic hypothesis. The explosion was from under the ground as seen in a volcanic eruption.

He suggested the vibration people felt was as a result of tremors which accompanies earthquakes. The earthquake led to the outflow of liquefied gas when escaped through the vent in a supersonic way forming a giant mushroom cloud of combustible gas. The gas on combining with oxygen ignited and we have a ferrocious gas fire.

He was not alone as his theories got some collaboration in 1994 on January 18, 1994 Cando Event that took place in Spain. It was an event where some citizen observed a glowing fireball which flew across the sky which many mistook for a meteor. This opinion was based on a massive crater formed with trees blown off some 100m from where it occurred. It was also a matter regarded as mysterious by some due to lack of meteor remnants.

As with the Tunguska, opinions were divided, but the late Czech Republic astronomer, Zdeněk Ceplecha of the Ondřejov Observatory in the Czech Republic, has some explanation.

He said the blast was a result of subterranean gasses that escaped via an explosion that removes a better part of the topsoil. Through convective reaction, an electric charge builds up and ignites the gases.

The UFO angle

We all love when science have visitors from that side of the divide where Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) reign supreme. This UFOs and intelligent aliens is a great plot for any science fiction writer on any day. So a Russian fiction writer, Alexander Kazantsev could not resist doing just that. He wrote a book where Tunguska impact event was an explosion of a nuclear-powered spacecraft in Mars.

That was all it took and their lots of "evidence" gathered to corroborate his story. The aliens, sadly, will not like it since all their supporters on earth were unable to substantiate all their claims irrespective of their vast range of "evidence" procured.

We love the pseudo-scientists and all the alien lovers, just imagine science without it!

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The black holes and antimatter angle

In the game of whodunnit, nothing is off limits, a Nature, very reputable science journal published the journal entitled- Was the Tungus Event due to a Black Hole?

Other scientists immediately countered this claim.

In 1941, Lincoln LaPaz has a theory into what caused the explosion. It was a result of subatomic particles colliding with antiparticles of opposite charge. The reaction known as annihilation, produces massive amounts of energy.

The Tunguska event was caused by the annihilation of some chunk of antimatter which crashed into Earth.

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Conclusion

More than a century later the debate is still ongoing. The scenario reminds one of a horrible crime that every detective wants to solve.

The accepted theory of what happened remained the meteorites.

The meteor left no gaping holes or crater as it was travelling through the atmosphere at about 33,500 miles per hour (53,913 kilometres per hour). At that speed the friction built up with air as the massive 220-million-pound space rock hurtles through the air causes it to raise the air temperature to more than 44,000 degrees Fahrenheit or about 27704 Celcius.

That early morning of June 30, 1908, at about 28,000 feet above the Tunguska River, the asteroid self-destructs with tremendous energy.

It was all a fireball party with the more significant part of the asteroid destroyed; no crater can form during impact.

But whatever happened that day, I am sure we do not want a repeat of it in a crowded city as the destruction is better imagined than experienced.

Thank you so much for reading.

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^{References
A Detailed Research The Tunguska Explosion Of 1908
The Story of Tunguska Impact Event
NASA: Tunguska 100 Years Later
What Happened at Tunguska
An Alternative Explanation of Tunguska Event}

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