lpetrich
Contributor
Back when it existed, my family visited the Soviet Union. One of the books that we got there is a book on Soviet spaceflight. It talked about planetary science also, and it mentioned a remarkable event.
Russia, 1908 June 30, 7:14 Krasnoyarsk time. About 750 km / 460 mi northeast of Krasnoyarsk in the middle of Siberia.
A pillar of bluish fire moves across the sky from east to north, almost as bright as the Sun. It makes a flash and a sound sort of like artillery. It also makes a shock wave that knocks nearby people over and breaks windows hundreds of km/mi away. It is picked up at meteorological stations as far as Britain, and it makes an earthquake with Richter magnitude 5.0.
It makes upper-atmosphere ice clouds that light up the night sky for a few days, and it puts dust into the air which lasts for several months.
Investigators did not arrive at the site for some years afterward. Local people were reluctant to visit because they believed that the event was a visitation by their fire god Ogdy.
From
Tunguska event:
I've seen estimates of its explosive force like 40 megatons. That makes the event's explosion bigger than any well-witnessed explosion on our planet in humanity's history until Tsar Bomba (50 megatons) or some other big nuclear explosion. The recent Chelyabinsk meteor had an explosive force only 1/100 of that.
Though the Tunguska explosion left no macroscopic fragments that anyone has been able to find, there is some dust there with composition anomalies like increased iridium.
I've found several theories for it, like:
I close with this short-short story that I composed: Tunguska and the Titanic on FictionPad
Russia, 1908 June 30, 7:14 Krasnoyarsk time. About 750 km / 460 mi northeast of Krasnoyarsk in the middle of Siberia.
A pillar of bluish fire moves across the sky from east to north, almost as bright as the Sun. It makes a flash and a sound sort of like artillery. It also makes a shock wave that knocks nearby people over and breaks windows hundreds of km/mi away. It is picked up at meteorological stations as far as Britain, and it makes an earthquake with Richter magnitude 5.0.
It makes upper-atmosphere ice clouds that light up the night sky for a few days, and it puts dust into the air which lasts for several months.
Investigators did not arrive at the site for some years afterward. Local people were reluctant to visit because they believed that the event was a visitation by their fire god Ogdy.
From
Tunguska event:Another site: The UnMuseum - The Great Siberian Explosion
I've seen estimates of its explosive force like 40 megatons. That makes the event's explosion bigger than any well-witnessed explosion on our planet in humanity's history until
Tsar Bomba (50 megatons) or some other big nuclear explosion. The recent Chelyabinsk meteor had an explosive force only 1/100 of that.Though the Tunguska explosion left no macroscopic fragments that anyone has been able to find, there is some dust there with composition anomalies like increased iridium.
I've found several theories for it, like:
- Small stony asteroid or comet, with a diameter ranging from 60 m (200 ft) to 190 m (620 ft)
- Lump of antimatter (sort-of mirror matter that's mostly like ordinary matter, not any sort of bizarro matter)
- Mini black hole
- Extraterrestrial spacecraft
- Non-extraterrestrial: gas eruption from the Earth's interior
I close with this short-short story that I composed: Tunguska and the Titanic on FictionPad
