It was a massive explosion that shook the countryside near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia. In those days the region was largely unpopulated. This isolated part of Russia was mostly covered with swamps, bogs and hilly cedar and pine forests. Had there been any settlements close by no one would have survived the shockwaves that resulted from the blast in the sky shortly after seven o'clock on the morning of June 30, 1908. Scientists were at a loss to explain exactly what was seen that day.
What Was Experienced Before and After the Explosion
A spherical object variously reported as yellow, red or white that was brighter than the sun raced across the horizon, and left a column of light behind it. The object emanated a glow so radiant it was seen more than four-hundred miles away. A witness named S.B. Semenov living in the village of Vanovara sixty kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion recalled that when he was sitting on his porch it appeared as though the sky had split in two, and above the forest the northern firmament seemed to be covered with fire. At that moment there was a wave of heat so unbearable he said, "My shirt almost burned off my back."
The subsequent detonation was equal to ten to fifteen megatons of TNT, and it was violent enough to break windows within a radius of two-hundred kilometers. Countless trees were charred and snapped like cheap toothpicks. Sounds described as thunderclaps were heard across vast distances. Barographs, which had recently been invented, picked up tremors in such far-off places as Jena (modern Germany) and London, England. One can imagine how different history might have been if the explosion had taken place over St. Petersburg, which was the center of Tsarist Russia at that time.
Investigations of Tunguska
Russian authorities quickly forgot about the Tunguska phenomenon. Little attention was paid to this unusual event because it was so difficult to get to the affected area. The First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution broke out a few years later, and these chaotic problems occupied the attention of the country for a long while.
It wasn't until 1927 that a geologist named Leonid V. Kulik successfully took an expedition to the site. He was convinced the damage was caused by a meteor but the evidence didn't support this belief. He looked in vain for a crater but instead saw a small forest of trees at Ground Zero. They had no branches but were nevertheless standing upright. Even more mystifying was the fact that there were no trees at all just a short distance from the center. Farther away from Ground Zero, trees were intact but on the ground and pointed in the opposite direction from the center.
The Cause of the Tunguska Explosion
World War II and Stalin's brutal regime closed the book on Tunguska once again. Theories abound as to the cause but there have been no definite answers for over one-hundred years. Was it a comet, a meteor, an asteroid, or something else entirely? It has been suggested that the bowl-shaped Lake Cheko is the result of a meteor impact, but conclusions have not been positive.
The leading theory has been an icy comet. William Hartmann, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said the distinction between comets and meteors can be unclear because of semantics. There are a variety of objects in space consisting of rock, ice and metal. Perhaps the mystery isn't quite clear — yet.
References:
Tunguska Blast Mystery Solved by Space Shuttle? by Brian Handwerk, National Geographic News, July 2, 2009
The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma, Icon Books Ltd., 2005
The Vital Vastness: The Living Cosmos by Richard Michael Pasichnyk, iUniverse, 2002
Scott Hayden - Since joining Suite101 in early 2007, I've contributed articles about travel, history and health. My speciality is writing about workplace ...
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