Deep in the Siberian forest is the record of an explosion
that is a thousand times larger than Hiroshima
It was a summer morning in the Tunguska River Basin
a man was sitting on his porch
enjoying the sunlight on his face
when suddenly he was blown backwards out of his chair
and he felt as if his whole body was on fire
he was 40 miles away from the center of this explosion
Windows shattered for hundreds of miles around
shockwaves rippled across Europe
the night sky was illuminated for weeks after
and people were able to read their newspapers in the middle of the night
from London to Asia
It was twenty years before a scientist was actually able
to make it out to the site of this disaster
Leonid Kulik, the chief curator of Meteorite collection
at the Saint Petersburg Museum
made a journey out in 1927
it was an arduous trip
it took forever to get to this remote area in the Siberian wilderness
and what he found shocked him
he found eighty three million trees felled in a circular radius
covering over 600 miles
at the center of this the trees stood straight up
burned to a crisp and stripped of their bark and their branches.
Locals were at first, really reluctant to talk to him
they thought that this explosion had been the work of Agdy
a god who had come down to punish them
by destroying their land and their livestock
So a hundred years later there are still questions
about exactly what happened at the Tunguska event
A space object, maybe a comet
but probably a meteorite
entered the earth’s atmosphere
this thing was two hundred feet wide
and probably weighed over two hundred and twenty million pounds
and it came into the atmosphere at around thirty three thousand miles per hour
as it speed towards the earth’s surface
it encountered the push back, the friction of the atmosphere
which heated it to over forty five thousand degrees
and it was at this moment
that it exploded
it sent our a shockwave in a butterfly pattern
imagine an explosions so powerful
that it could explode miles above the earth’s surface
and still measure as a 5.0 on the Richter Scale
had it happened over a city
it easily could have leveled an area the size of Tokyo
and here’s the thing
while it was relatively rare
astronomers have done the math
and they think an event like this happens
roughly every three hundred years
so, depending on probability
we’ve got another Tunguska event
in our near future
Duhn dun duhhhhhh!
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There should be little explosions happening
If little explosions didn’t happen
Then something went wrong
The debate still goes on
about whether it was a meteorite or a comet
there are good arguments for both
Some Italian scientists believe that they have in fact found the impact crater
Cheko Lake
Of course, the locals are like “No that Lake has definitely been here forever
so it’s a little bit hard to say
there is a weird theory that it is a kind of a gas vent
that was releasing an enormous amount of I don’t know, methane I guess
where it created a kind of huge pool of gas in the sky
going down to the vent
and then it was struck by lighting
and it was like a wick down to this gas crater
and it exploded in this enormous insane way
but it’s a lot more likely that it was just a meteorite