NEWS: Tunguska: Curiosity Satisfied?

GEEK: Tunguska: Curiosity Satisfied?

Imagine yourself in Siberia almost one hundred years ago. On a summer morning at 7:15 AM, you see a blue light screaming across the sky. Ten minutes later, there's a bright flash, and the ground thuds like artillery fire. Shockwaves shake the earth for hundreds of miles. For 830 square miles, the Siberian forest is a landscape of fallen trees. Seismographs across Eurasia record the strange occurence, and for weeks, the skies are still illuminated.

This weird and wonderful bit of history has come to be known as the Tunguska event. The explosion of June 30, 1908 has been estimated to be 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

It wasn't until 1927 that remote Tunguska, Siberia was visited by scientists wishing to study the incident.

Though the dominant theory since the event has been that it was the result of a meteoroid or a comet exploding a few miles away from earth (due to both the shocks and the extraterrestrial debris found in later investigations), the lack of an impact crater has led to a lot of speculation through the years. Some of my favorite theories: that it was the result of a small black hole passing through the earth (yowch!), that it was the result of a chunk of antimatter falling to earth (double yowch!), or the very best of all, that a nuclear-powered UFO crashed/exploded there (you can always count on Pravda for the best articles) and/or extraterrestrials fired some sort of weapon (Siberia is a huge threat to Zeta Reticuli, you know). There was a pretty good X-Files episode about it. And even Pynchon has weighed in.

As such, I have some depressing news from that great cosmic cockblocker known as Science.

A team of scientists say that they have finally found the primary impact crater.

Of course, this only accounts for a single large fragment of whatever the space object was that exploded over the Siberian taiga back in 1908. If indeed an asteroid fell to earth, there would be smaller craters also to be found in the surrounding area. The lack thereof leads credence to the hypothesis that the object was a comet (the dominant idea in Russia), whose icy composition lends itself to annihilation rather than scattered debris. Also, the team still has a lot of testing to do, as every other investigation of Lake Cheko has found it older than the century it would have to be to have been the result of the Tunguska impact. So the book is not yet closed on Tunguska.

It's compelling evidence, for sure, though I still like the nuclear UFO explanation (I apply the principle of Fluxy's Razor (also known as Occam's Curling Iron) to all situations: the most interesting/weird/funny explanation is the best).

Regardless of whether or not its mystery is ever conclusively solved, Tunguska is sure to haunt and enthrall us for another century, a sobering warning of how precariously Earth is hung within the cosmos.

Imagine this over Moscow, or Tokyo, or New York.

Flux is become Death, destroyer of worlds.

Sad fact: I knew about Tunguska from an X-Files episode.

It has been examined before and all the sediment was decided to be too old to make it an impact crater. Crazy.

I blame the Greys.

I read somewhere that if the impact had occurred 4 hours and 45 minutes later, St. Petersburg would have been obliterated.