June 30, 1908. Tunguska Event still a mystery 100 years on....

[December]

At 7.14 a.m. local time (12.14 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time), an explosion occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in East Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk Territory, not far from the Vanavara trading post, now Vanavara town, the administrative center of the Evenki Autonomous Area’s Tungussko-Chunsky District.

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Pictures such as this, taken by the Leonid Kulik expedition in 1930,
show the directional fall of trees over a wide area.


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The meteorite could have killed millions of people if it had exploded over a densely populated area.

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A place in the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River where the Tunguska Meteorite fell on June 30, 1908. Scientists working in different fields are still trying to solve the mystery of the Tunguska explosion. An expedition studying the Tunguska event has a laboratory here, on the shore of a taiga lake.

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Diamond-graphite formations from the site of the Tunguska event on the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in the Krasnoyarsk Territory.

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Alexei Zolotov, a well-known authority on the Tunguska event and department chief at the Oktyabrsky subsidiary of the All-Union Geophysical Prospecting Methods Institute.

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Soviet scientist Alexei Zolotov, left, scooping up earth samples in the vicinity of the Tunguska event.

[December]

Tunguska ... a 40 megaton atom bomb in 1908..!!??

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WHAT LIES BEHIND THE TUNGUSKA EXPLOSION?

Four years from now, 30 June 2008, will be the 100th anniversary of one of the most mysterious catastrophes: the explosion of a body from space near the Podkamennaya (or Stony) Tunguska River in Siberia. There can scarcely have been another event in the past century to compare with it. The total power of the explosion exceeded the combined power of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than 2,000 times over!

Apart from that, the Tunguska explosion caused:

• an anomalous glow in the sky that was observed as late as 10 days afterwards, and the intense appearance of silvery clouds;

• massive radiation of light and heat;

• disruption of the normal functioning of meteorological instruments and the appearance of surface earth tremors;

• a tremendous sound wave that travelled twice around the globe;

• the felling of trees over an enormous area of over 2,000 square kilometres;

• weak traces of radioactivity, detected in tree samples and the polar ice layers dating from 1908;

• anomalous properties of the soil and minerals in the area of the Tunguska explosion;

• the unusually rapid growth of vegetation at the epicentre of the Tunguska explosion;

• cooling of the Earth's climate in the following few years.

Despite the fact that such a tremendous event did not go unnoticed, the first attempts to discover what had actually occurred in the remote Siberian taiga were only made many years later, in 1927. Since then, dozens of research expeditions have visited the area, hundreds of scientific papers have been written and several hundred hypotheses put forward about the causes of the event. Not one of them, however, has been able to explain fully the complex phenomena that preceded and accompanied the Tunguska explosion. Some of the phenomena observed by eyewitnesses simply do not fit within the framework of existing theories. Much of what happened then cannot be interpreted at all from the standpoint of present-day scientific thinking.

http://www.galactic.no/rune/tunguska.html

[December]

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Scientists working in different fields are still trying to solve the mystery of the Tunguska explosion.

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The small taiga village of Vanavara is the closest settlement to the site of the Tunguska event.

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A memorial was erected at the site dedicated to the centenary of the Tunguska event.