- On the morning of June 30th, 1908,
humanity got a harsh reminder of its position
in the universe.
Although we live our day-to-day lives without much thought
of the cosmic forces surrounding our planet,
this doesn't mean that we live in a vacuum.
Thousands of objects enter the Earth's atmosphere
every year.
And we're usually lucky enough to be none the wiser,
but what happened on that day more than a century ago,
still perplexes us.
The only certainty we have is that the destruction
and fall out that took place in the far reaches
of Eastern Siberia could have been much, much worse.
This is the story of the Tunguska event,
the disaster that disappeared.
Due to the time period and remote location,
where the Tunguska event took place,
the only accounts of the explosion itself
are from firsthand survivors
that were lucky enough to live through the event.
First, was a man enjoying his breakfast on the porch
of a ranger station in an isolated region of East Siberia.
It was early morning, approximately 7:14 AM,
and the sun had just begun to creep over the horizon's edge.
Suddenly this calm morning was transformed
into something much more terrifying.
The ranger claimed that he saw the horizon split into two
with a long column of bluish fire moving across the sky.
First came the warmth, a sudden burst of heat,
rising all around him.
He wanted to run to get away,
but he was too absorbed in what was happening
before his eyes.
The earth began to shake.
And just as the explosion happened,
the blue fireball vanished.
It seemed to leave only a long plume of smoke behind.
Then came the noise.
The man felt an incredible force,
flick his body away from where he was sitting.
His wife was inside at the time and ran out to grab him
in an attempt to get him to safety.
The explosion shook the world around them one last time
and then it was over.
As they looked around,
they saw the deafening noise had shattered the windows
of the ranger station.
Another case which actually resulted in a casualty,
came from Acqualina a woman from a local tribe in the area.
She spoke of waking from her sleep
to a brilliant blue light, blinding her and her husband.
When they attempted to flee,
a whirlwind started to throw them around.
After losing consciousness for a few seconds,
she opened her eyes to see her husband being slammed
by the invisible force against a nearby tree.
He would die from his injuries just a few hours later.
Acqualina's husband is one of three reported people
to have died in the incident,
but due to the remoteness of the area,
paired with many of the tribes being isolated from society,
the true death toll is most likely, much higher.
As the newspapers began to report on the incident,
what was immediately clear was the incredible reach
of this mysterious explosion.
Eye witness reports seem to stretch across most of Siberia
and Russia, but it was even detected
at thousands of miles away.
In the UK and Germany, it read clearly on seismic detectors
and even clocked in at a 5.2 on the Richter scale
from nearby detectors.
Even as far as Washington DC, people recorded evidence
of what happened on the morning of June 30th, 1908.
Monitoring systems picked up the same whirlwind
that had flung the ranger from his porch.
And data pointed to a sudden rise
in the air dispersion indicating a massive burst.
Whatever happened was powerful enough to make waves
across the globe.
Despite all of this, figuring out exactly
what actually happened, presented numerous challenges.
The event took place in the near banks
of the Tunguska River, which was a sparsely populated area.
Most of this was due to the inhospitality of the region
with temperatures in the winter falling dramatically.
In absence of a clear answer to what happened,
it became simply known as the Tunguska event
based on where it happened.
Today Tunguska event continues to fascinate everyone
from astrophysicists to conspiracy theorists.
The leading theory surrounding the mystery
was that it was an asteroid or comet.
Of course, earth is no stranger to anomalies crashing
from space with instances recorded since pre-modern history.
This theory makes even more sense given how large Siberia is.
If something were to crash into the planet,
Siberia is 55,000 of square mile odds.
Even if the Tunguska event was terrifying
to those who experienced it firsthand,
we now know that it wouldn't necessarily be a total outlier
in history.
That is of course, except for one issue,
whatever it is that the crashed down at Tunguska,
left no crater,
no visible sign that it was a comment or asteroid.
So what could this strange object have been?
Let's go back to the beginning.
It turns out that the dramatic blue fireball wasn't the end
of the event's reach.
In the weeks following, hundreds of people reported
seeing lights in the sky.
This glow was bright enough that individuals
could take clear, brightly lit photographs
in the middle of the night.
One man, even reported sitting on his porch
in the middle of the night, reading his newspapers
with just the glow from the sky.
For a time after the event,
the line between day and night seemed to blur.
With reports of the phenomenon reaching as far as Asia.
In an attempt to uncover what happened,
an expedition into the region was planned.
It took almost two decades following 1908,
before Russian mineralogists Leonid Kulik was able to find
the location of the impact.
Kulik had been campaigning to secure funding
for his research expedition ever since the event happened.
In 1921, he led a Soviet team who were among the first
to collect eyewitness reports.
This is where the report from the ranger who was flung up
from his porch was documented.
The team was unable to find the impact zone
on their first trip, largely thanks
to poor weather conditions.
After a difficult second expedition, in 1927,
they have reached something that could have been
the impact zone with the assistance of some local tribes.
Something that by all accounts should have been
the impact zone.
But if it was a meteor or comment that crashed into earth
as some researchers in the expedition were expecting
it didn't leave a crater.
Flatland greeted them where they expected to find a crater.
The only evidence that this was in fact,
the impact zone was in the trees.
Erie photographs of what the research team found now mark,
the memory of the Tunguska event,
millions of trees had been scorched and knocked away
from an epicenter in a radial pattern.
The direction they faced away from,
paired with the collaboration of reports made it clear
that this was in fact the correct location.
In the center of the site was a square mile area
that had leveled more than 80 million trees.
A decimated Taiga Forest surrounding a flat plane,
not a clausal crater was just about the last thing
that Kulik and his party expected to discover.
Kulik himself was confused by what he had found,
but he didn't leave empty handed.
Because of the physical proof in the leveled trees,
his team could begin calculating what had really happened.
What they discovered disturbed them and still to this day
is under debate by astronomers.
Whatever came down from the skies over the Tunguska River
was large enough to have devastated a large city.
It was estimated to be between a 50 and 100 meters
in size going off of Kulik's calculations.
The object wasn't like those that came before it after all.
If things had happened differently
and the object did hit the earth,
things could have been much, much worse.
It was apparent that if the Tunguska object was this size,
it wouldn't have needed to hit the earth
to cause devastating destruction.
Just the scorched treeline alone was the size of Tokyo.
Anywhere else in the world, the sheer amount of devastation
that surrounded the phantom impact zone could have caused
a mass death situation.
It could have leveled towns,
it could have wiped entire cities off the face of history.
And still the lingering question from Kulik's expedition,
why wasn't there an impact zone?
If you do any amount of research into the Tunguska event,
you'll find many rabbit holes to fall into.
Theories ranging from a meteor to nuclear bombs
and even aliens have been proposed.
Let's start by taking a look at the more promising theories.
The most plausible theory is that the event
was the result of a comment or asteroid.
The biggest issue with this theory for Kulik was the absence
of a crater at the disaster site.
But over the years, an explanation has emerged
for why there might not be one.
The leading reasoning behind this is that the comet
or asteroid burned up during the entry
into Earth's atmosphere.
These final dramatic explosions when the object
is finally decimated by the forest
are referred to as air bursts.
And this theory would explain most of the firsthand reports
from the event.
The same story ran through all the eyewitness reports,
a devastating roar as the bluish fire crashed down
and after it shot into the horizon and began to get quieter,
all the documented witnesses spoke
of a second louder explosion,
a shockwave from the air bursts.
The explanation also makes even more sense
when comparing it to a confirmed airburst event,
one that happened in our lifetimes.
The Chelyabinsk event of 2013
was the most widely witnessed incidents
of an object crashing down to earth.
It was almost like history repeating itself.
Witnesses reported being blinded by a bright blue light
as something came crashing down.
Unlike the Tunguska event,
the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded 14 miles above earth
was recorded by dash cams and cell phones.
Also unlike Tunguska,
that catastrophe didn't happen somewhere remote.
Although no fatalities were reported,
around 1500 people were injured by the final shockwave.
Mark Boslough a physicist and researcher
at the Los Alamos National Library is an expert
on asteroid collision theory.
He has written multiple papers on Tunguska
in light of the 2013 event.
One of the things he notes in his research
is the Tunguska should have left some semblance
of physical evidence behind when Kulik discovered the area.
Either large chunks of iron or more disturbance
to the flat landscape should have been immediately obvious.
He called for other astronomers to take the 2013 event
as a reason to re-investigate Tunguska in full.
The calls from Boslough and other scientists seemed
to pay off with interest reignited in the Tunguska event
after the 2013 meteor incident.
We might be getting closer to some evidence
of what the object might've been.
Small collections of material that date back far enough
to be consistent with the 1908 event have now been found
in the area.
But we're still not 100% sure of the composition
of the object.
An alternative theory comes
from astrophysicist Wolfgang Kundt who proposed
that an eruption of natural gas from within the Earth's core
could have been the cause of the devastation.
Wolfgang believed that natural gas stored deep
within the Earth's core could have expanded
to a breaking point that caused a huge explosion.
The reasoning behind his theory came from the original lack
of physical evidence of a meteor
and the pattern in which the trees fell back.
However, this theory has not gotten much traction
over the years.
Another theory that's gained a following comes from
Alexander Kazantsev in the 1950s.
When he had visited Hiroshima in 1945,
he noticed that the nuclear blast had decimated
the surrounding tree lines,
ripping off their branches and leaves
in a similar way to what had happened in Tunguska.
The nuclear fireball had been powerful enough
to fling cars miles away from the impact zone,
but most of the trees closest to the blast stood disturbed
and charred, but not uprooted.
Kazantsev proposed that the event could be explained
by nuclear origins.
However, he proposed that this was due
to some sort of extra terrestrial spacecraft
or an atomic weapon constructed outside our realm
of understanding.
His theory would be ridiculed for its dependence
on extra terrestrials to explain the event,
but regardless he captured the public's imagination
and drew attention from fringe skeptics
to provide alternative explanations for the strange event.
Other theories that gained popularity over the years,
come from some believing that the event was the result
of a black hole colliding with the earth
or even that it could be evidence of a glitch in the matrix.
More grounded fringe theories,
cite everything from a secret mining disaster
to a plan to testing operation by the Soviets.
It seems that the most plausible of all of these remains
that the asteroid slash comet theory.
The evidence that it may have been an airburst
is the most convincing.
And yet we still don't even know whether it was an asteroid
or comet.
This will depend entirely on the composition of the object
and more than a century later,
it seems like we may never have a definitive answer.
Even if this was the case and Tunguska was just an asteroid
or comet that exploded right before
it hit the surface of the earth,
it doesn't make the situation any less disturbing.
The Tunguska object had the potential
to change human history if it would have landed
in a different spot.
As the 2013 meteor footage now shows us clearly
it could have happened at a much more populated area.
Today, some scientists claim that Tunguska
was much smaller and less destructive
than originally thought.
They dispute Kulik's initial calculations of its size.
Boslough is among those who fall into this camp,
but he doesn't argue the Tunguska was insignificant.
If Tunguska got as close to the planet as it did,
Boslough suggested that it must have been small enough
to get decimated by the forest of the atmosphere.
Some say Tunguska was much close to the size
of the 2013 meteor.
But the 2013 meteor by all previous calculations
was far more catastrophic than it should have been.
Boslough and multiple other scientists are actively saying
that the 2013 event points to the fact that air bursts
from foreign objects entering the atmosphere
can be even more dangerous than those that make a touchdown.
The Tunguska object being closer to the size
of the 2013 meteor should have been a relief.
Instead of scientists like Boslough point
to the devastation seen in the 2013 meteor
that suggest that it's time
for a robust global warning system for objects entering
the atmosphere.
The Tunguska event remains a harsh reminder
that we do not live in a floating vacuum.
Every day, thousands of smaller objects crash
into our atmosphere and scientists
are now rediscovering Tunguska's significance.
It shows how much we might have underestimated the dangers
of even smaller objects entering our atmosphere.
It points to our only certainty that eventually
there will be another event like Tunguska.
Thanks so much for making it to the end of the video
and have a good night.