Tunguska, A Century Later

Science News ^ | 6-5-2008 | Sid Perkins

[blam]

Tunguska, a century later

By Sid PerkinsJune 5th, 2008

Asteroid or comet blamed for Siberian blast of 1908

BLAST FROM THE PAST

The Tunguska blast shook Siberia in 1908, but on-site investigations were delayed for two decades. One of the first photos showed a large area of flattened trees.

Early on the morning of June 30, 1908, a massive explosion shook central Siberia. Witnesses told of a fireball that streaked in from the southeast and then detonated in the sky above the desolate, forested region. At the nearest trading post, about 70 kilometers away from the blast, people were reportedly knocked from their feet. Seismic instruments in the area registered ground motions equivalent to those of a magnitude-5 earthquake.

Effects of the event—often called the Tunguska blast, after a major river running through the area—weren’t restricted to Siberia. Sensitive barometers in England detected an atmospheric shock wave as it raced westward and then detected it again after it traveled around the world. High-altitude clouds that formed over the region after the event were so lofty that they caught light from beyond the horizon, illuminating the sky so much that people at locales in Europe and Asia could read newspapers outdoors at midnight.

A number of factors—including the site’s remote location, World War I and the Russian Revolution—prevented scientists from mounting an expedition to the blast zone for almost two decades, says physicist Giuseppe Longo of the University of Bologna in Italy. When researchers eventually reached the region, they found that a 2,150-square-kilometer patch of forest had been flattened, with most of the 80 million trees lying in a radial pattern. What the researchers didn’t find, however, was an obvious crater.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2028449/posts?page=25#25

[null and void]

Hmmmmm. Less imbedded abrasive ash than using a volcano...

[colorado tanker]

Scully and Mulder came up with some pretty interesting findings about Tunguska, too. Don't mess with any black rocks or black oil up there. :-))

[SunkenCiv]

:’) Weird that a chunk of space debris that was probably from this Solar System brought the extraterrestrial ‘black oil’ from a different system, but hey, I cut them some slack. Not going to see the second movie though — the series should have taken the “Dick Van Dyke Show” route and had a preplanned five year lifespan.

[SunkenCiv]

;’)

[Monkey Face]

I suspect the tree trunks are still there, though by now, they’re probably mulch.

Every time I see a documentary on that event, there is more information. Mostly scientific, of course, but it’s quite interesting how technology has implemented the original theories.

[Monkey Face]

Did you ply “them” with chocolate before you brought out the blasting caps?

[null and void]

Nope. Chocolate doesn’t last long enough around me to use it to ply anyone else.

[Monkey Face]

That’s about how long chocolate lasts in here, too....
I wonder why that is?...

:oþ

[Calvin Locke]

Sandia did some computer simulations on Tunguska a year or two ago.

They released some shockwave animations of different aspects of theories on the object at Tunguska.