Add Your Photos and Video to This Story

Tunguska Blast Bigger than Hiroshima Still a Mystery 100 years Later

by Rob Walker | July 4, 2008 at 10:25 am | 243 views | add comment

Sometime in the early morning of June 30, 1908, some sort of massive explosion shook central Siberia. Witnesses at the time said they saw a fireball detonate in the sky above a desolate, forested region.

What occurred during this time isn't exactly known, but the ramifications were instantaneous: a blast 100 the times the size of the Nuclear bomb at Hiroshima devastated the area, knocking down over 80 million trees and tossing people to the ground over 90 kilometers away.

Though scientists weren't able to reach the area for 20 years, due to the Russian Revolution and the first World War, they have been studying the area ever since...and are no closer to a real answer.

The closest they've gotten is the theory that a meteorite broke up in orbit and detonated in mid-air, causing the huge explosion but not leaving enough large pieces to form craters or leave chunks lying around. Not a spot of radioactive material was found anywhere near the site either.

100 years later, and it remains one of the world's greatest mysteries (even featuring in several X-Files episodes).

Despite countless investigations, the so-called Tunguska Event remains one of the 20th century's greatest enigmas -- seized upon by mystics, UFO enthusiasts and scientists as evidence of angry gods, extraterrestrial life or the impending threat of a cosmic collision.

But says Stanislav Krivyakov, who has spent the past 35 years investigating the Siberian blast, despite intense interest in the event -- which has featured in several episodes of "The X-Files" -- no conclusive evidence has been found to support any theory.

The Tunguska Event, or Tunguska explosion, was a massive explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, at around 7:14 a.m.[1] (0:14 UT, 7:02 a.m. local solar time[2]) on June 30, 1908 (June 17 in the Julian calendar, in use locally at the time).[2]

Effects of the event—often called the Tunguska blast, after a major river running through the area—weren’t restricted to Siberia. Sensitive barometers in England detected an atmospheric shock wave as it raced westward and then detected it again after it traveled around the world. High-altitude clouds that formed over the region after the event were so lofty that they caught light from beyond the horizon, illuminating the sky so much that people at locales in Europe and Asia could read newspapers outdoors at midnight.

Read last year's Tunguska crater story on NowPublic here:

Something really, really big exploded over Siberia about 100 years ago; but scientists have argued ever since over whether it was a comet or an asteroid. Now we might be one step closer to knowing the truth.