Occurred in 1908, these days marks 100 years, but this event still raises many questions from scientists and attracts the attention of the public.
This is the only large-scale space catastrophe in the memory of mankind, comparable in its consequences to a nuclear strike. If the impact of the Tunguska body fell on a densely populated area, the number of victims could be measured in millions of lives.
In the solar system, millions of small bodies - comets, asteroids, meteorites - many of which, when falling to the Earth, can cause a catastrophe even larger than the Tunguska.
However, the nature of the space body that fell in the Siberian taiga is still not completely clear, just as it is not clear which of our space "neighbors" - asteroids, comets, other bodies, should be followed by humanity in order to avoid a repetition of the catastrophe.
The study of the Tunguska catastrophe allows one to see all the ecological and geophysical consequences of the fall of a cosmic body, to draw conclusions about the possible short and long-term consequences of such events.
Catastrophe
The Tunguska catastrophe occurred 100 years ago - June 30, 1908 at 07.14 local time (0.14 GMT) in the basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska river, not far from the Vanavara trading post (now the village of Vanavara, the regional center of the Tunguska-Chunsky region of the Evenki Autonomous Okrug) in an area with geographical coordinates 60 ° 53 "North and 101 ° 53" East.
At about seven o'clock in the morning over the territory of the Yenisei basin from the south-east to the north-west from the direction of the Sun a fireball flew by - a bolide. It was visible in the vast territory of Eastern Siberia between the Lena and Podkamennaya Tunguska rivers. The car's visibility area was about 600 kilometers.
People who watched his flight were horrified by the blinding light and rumbling sounds. Thunder rumbled for more than a thousand kilometers around. In houses, windows trembled, suspended objects swayed. The roar was such that a train was stopped on the Trans-Siberian Railway near Kansk, the driver of which decided that an explosion had occurred in its composition.
The flight of the meteorite caused panic among the Russian population of villages on the Lower Tunguska and on the Angara. Some, who had just come from the Russian-Japanese war, decided that the Japanese had come to the Angara, others were expecting the coming of the Antichrist.
The flight of the bolide ended with a grandiose explosion over the deserted taiga at an altitude of about 7-10 kilometers. The explosion caused an earthquake, the magnitude of which is estimated from 4.7 to 5 units. The explosion power was 10-40 megatons in TNT equivalent, which corresponds to the energy of an average hydrogen bomb. Even at a distance of hundreds of kilometers from the epicenter, eyewitnesses received minor burns.
There were no people directly in the area of the fall - the nearest Evenk camp was 20 kilometers away, but there, too, the blast wave raised plague into the air and scattered the dogs. According to the Evenks, during the fall of the Tungus body, about a thousand deer were killed, and they themselves suffered.
The explosion completely knocked down a forest on a huge territory - on an area of 2,150 square kilometers (this roughly corresponds to the area of modern Moscow). The outbreak burned a forest over an area of 200 square kilometers and caused a huge forest fire.
On the first day after the catastrophe, in almost the entire northern hemisphere - from Bordeaux to Tashkent, from the shores of the Atlantic to Krasnoyarsk, strange atmospheric phenomena were observed - twilight unusual in brightness and color, night sky glow, bright silvery clouds, daytime optical effects - halos and crowns around the sun ... The radiance of the sky was so strong that many residents could not sleep. In a number of cities, a small print newspaper could be read freely at night, and a photograph of the seaport was obtained in Greenwich at midnight. This phenomenon continued for several more nights.
The disaster caused fluctuations in the magnetic field recorded in Irkutsk and the German city of Kiel. The magnetic storm resembled in its parameters the perturbations of the Earth's magnetic field observed after high-altitude nuclear explosions.
It was on this day that the aurora, unusual in shape and power, was observed in Antarctica, described by the participants of Shackleton's English Antarctic expedition.
Research
Scientists found themselves in the disaster area only 20 years later - only in 1927. The first researcher of the Tunguska phenomenon was Leonid Kulik, who in 1921 headed an expedition organized by the Academy of Sciences of the RSFSR to collect information about meteorites.
He became interested in old press reports about an unusual event on the Yenisei - the then newspapermen reported about the fall of a meteorite in the Kansk region. Kulik collected eyewitness reports and found out that a meteorite really flew over the Yenisei province and fell in the area of Podkamennaya Tunguska. In 1927, Kulik's expedition first penetrated the disaster area. The participants discovered a felling of the forest with traces of burns.
Scientists believed they were dealing with the fall of a large meteorite, so at the crash site they expected to see an impact crater from its fall, similar to other known craters. It was at the identification of such formations that the main efforts of Kulik's expeditions were directed. However, all efforts were unsuccessful.
In the 1960s, the expedition, the Committee on Meteorites of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, continued to look for traces of a giant meteorite falling, did not find them and stopped further field research. Later, the enthusiasts created a Complex Amateur Expedition that had been exploring the disaster area for many years.
So scientists faced the main mystery of the Tunguska meteorite - a powerful explosion clearly took place over the taiga, knocking down a forest over a huge area, but what caused it did not leave any traces.
Since the power of the explosion said that the cosmic body had a mass of several tens of thousands of tons, it seemed that such an amount of matter could not disappear without a trace, but so far no traces of the Tunguska body have been found.
Hypotheses
In 1934, it was first suggested that in 1908, it was not a meteorite — stone or iron — that invaded the earth's atmosphere, but a comet. Since the nuclei of comets are composed mostly of frozen gas and ice, this explains the absence of cosmic matter on earth.
In the second half of the 20th century, scientists discovered a small amount of meteoric dust in the soil, but it can be found anywhere on the earth's surface, since the combustion of meteors in the Earth's atmosphere occurs constantly. Anomalous concentrations of some elements were found, but it was not possible to accurately associate them with the catastrophe.
Later studies, in particular, the results of studies of Halley's comet showed that this hypothesis does not fully explain the situation - the proportion of refractory substances, in particular, silicon compounds, in comets turned out to be much higher than previously thought. At the crash site, there should have been a significant amount of substance sprayed during the explosion - however, it was not found.
Nevertheless, at the moment, the cometary hypothesis, along with the asteroid one, remains the most popular among scientists. In particular, a version of a collision with a fragment of comet Encke was expressed.
After the appearance of atomic weapons, the Tunguska catastrophe again attracted public attention - the similarity of this event with a nuclear explosion was obvious.
Soviet science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev in 1946 first expressed the opinion that the explosion of an alien spacecraft with a nuclear power plant was the cause of the disaster. Later, a number of scientists carry out calculations that show that the Tunguska explosion could have occurred only due to the internal energy of the cosmic body.
Later, this hypothesis was expressed in different versions many times and is still very popular among ufologists. Scientists expressed the opinion that the catastrophe was caused by a laser signal from an alien civilization.
The absence of matter from a cosmic body at the crash site forced the American astronomer Lincoln la Paz in 1948 to put forward a hypothesis that the Tunguska meteorite consisted of antimatter, and the explosion was caused by its annihilation with terrestrial matter.
In 1973, American physicists Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan put forward the hypothesis that the Tunguska meteorite was a miniature "black hole" that entered the Earth in Siberia and, after passing through the globe, exited in the North Atlantic.
Some scholars have tried to explain the Tunguska event by purely terrestrial reasons.
In particular, assumptions were made about its volcanic nature - the catastrophe, in their opinion, was caused by the release and explosion of a huge amount of natural gas from a tectonic crack. It was hypothesized that the Tunguska explosion was associated with a giant ball lightning.
Finally, in the mid-1990s, the Tunguska catastrophe began to be attributed to human activities. In the book of the predictor Manfred Dimde, the idea was expressed that the Tunguska explosion was caused by the consequences of the experiment of the American researcher Nikola Tesla on the transmission of electromagnetic waves at a distance.
Allegedly, a few months before the explosion, Tesla claimed that he could light the way to the north pole of the expedition of the famous traveler Piri. When trying to do this, he made a mistake in the calculations.
In the early morning of June 30, 1908, an explosion was heard over the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. According to experts, its power was about 2000 times more than the explosion of an atomic bomb.
Facts
In addition to the Tunguska meteorite, the amazing phenomenon was also called the Khatanga, Turukhansky and Filimonovsky meteorites. After the explosion, a magnetic disturbance was noted, which lasted about 5 hours, and during the flight of the Tunguska fireball, a bright glow was reflected in the northern rooms of nearby villages.
According to various estimates, the TNT equivalent of the Tunguska explosion is practically equal to one or two bombs detonated over Hiroshima.
With all the phenomenality of what happened, a scientific expedition led by L. A. Kulik to the place of the "meteorite fall" took place only twenty years later.
Meteorite theory
The first and most mysterious version lasted until 1958, when a denial was made public. According to this theory, the Tunguska body is a huge iron or stone meteorite.
But even now its echoes haunt contemporaries. Even in 1993, a group of American scientists conducted research, concluding that the object could be a meteorite that exploded at an altitude of about 8 km. It was the traces of a meteorite fall that Leonid Alekseevich and the team of scientists were looking for in the epicenter, although they were embarrassed by the initial absence of a crater and a forest that was fanned out from the center.
Fantastic theory
Not only the inquisitive minds of scientists are occupied by the Tunguska riddle. No less interesting is the theory of science fiction writer A.P. Kazantsev, who pointed to the similarity between the events of 1908 and the explosion in Hiroshima.
In his original theory, Alexander Petrovich suggested that the fault was the accident and explosion of the nuclear reactor of an interplanetary spacecraft.
If we take into account the calculations of A. A. Sternfeld, one of the pioneers of cosmonautics, then it was on June 30, 1908 that a unique opportunity was created for a drone-probe to fly around Mars, Venus and the Earth.
Nuclear theory
In 1965, the Nobel Prize winners, American scientists K. Cowanny and W. Libby developed the idea of L. Lapaz's colleague about the antimatter nature of the Tunguska incident.
They suggested that as a result of the collision of the Earth and a certain mass of antimatter, annihilation and the release of nuclear energy occurred.
The Ural geophysicist A. V. Zolotov analyzed the motion of the fireball, the magnetogram and the nature of the explosion, said that only an "internal explosion" of its own energy could lead to such consequences. Despite the arguments of the opponents of the idea, nuclear terrorism is still the leader in the number of adherents among specialists in the field of the Tunguska problem.
Ice comet
One of the latter is the hypothesis of an icy comet, which was put forward by the physicist G. Bybin. The hypothesis arose on the basis of the diaries of the researcher of the Tunguska problem, Leonid Kulik.
At the site of the "fall", the latter found a substance in the form of ice, covered with peat, but did not pay special attention to it. Bybin, however, claims that this compressed ice, found 20 years later at the scene, is not a sign of permafrost, but a direct indication of an ice comet.
According to the scientist, the ice comet, consisting of water and carbon, simply flew about the Earth, touching it at speed, like with a hot frying pan.
Is Tesla to blame?
At the beginning of the XXI century, an interesting theory appeared, indicating the connection of Nikola Tesla with the Tungus events. Several months before the incident, Tesla claimed that he could light the way for the traveler Robert Peary to the North Pole. At the same time, he requested maps of the "least populated parts of Siberia."
Allegedly on this day, June 30, 1908, Nikola Tesla conducted an experiment with the transfer of energy "through the air." According to the theory, the scientist managed to "swing" a wave filled with the pulsed energy of the ether, which entailed a discharge of incredible power, comparable to an explosion.
Other theories
At the moment, there are several dozen different theories that meet various criteria for what happened. Many of them are fantastic and even absurd.
For example, the disintegration of a flying saucer or the departure from the ground of a graviobolide are mentioned. A. Olkhovatov, a physicist from Moscow, is absolutely convinced that the event of 1908 was a kind of earthquake, and the Krasnoyarsk researcher D. Timofeev explained that the reason was an explosion of natural gas, which was set on fire by a meteorite that flew into the atmosphere.
American scientists M. Rian and M. Jackson stated that the destruction was caused by a collision with a "black hole", and physicists V. Zhuravlev and M. Dmitriev believe that the blame is the burst of a solar plasma clot and the subsequent explosion of several thousand ball lightning.
For more than 100 years since the incident, it has not been possible to come to a single hypothesis. None of the proposed versions was able to fully meet all proven and irrefutable criteria, such as the passage of a high-rise body, a powerful explosion, an air wave, burns of trees at the epicenter, atmospheric optical anomalies, magnetic disturbances and the accumulation of isotopes in the soil.
Often the versions were based on unusual finds made near the study area. In 1993, a corresponding member of the Petrovskaya Academy of Sciences and Arts, Yu. Lavbin, as part of the research expedition of the public fund "Tunguska space phenomenon" (now he is its president), discovered unusual stones near Krasnoyarsk, and in 1976 in the Komi ASSR they discovered "Your iron", recognized as a fragment of a cylinder or sphere with a diameter of 1.2 m.
The anomalous zone of the "devil's cemetery" with an area of about 250 square meters, located in the Angara taiga of the Kezhemsky region of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, is also often mentioned.
Plants and animals perish in the area formed by something "fallen from the sky", people prefer to bypass it. The consequences of the June morning of 1908 also include the unique geological object Patomsky crater, located in the Irkutsk region and discovered in 1949 by the geologist V.V.Kolpakov. The height of the cone is about 40 meters, the diameter along the ridge is about 76 meters.
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110 years have passed, and the mystery of the Tunguska phenomenon still haunts both scientists and amateurs interested in mysterious phenomena. Proponents of the theory of visiting the Earth by representatives of alien civilizations are sure that here we are dealing with a catastrophe of an alien starship. There is still no evidence that the explosion over the Siberian taiga was a natural phenomenon or a man-made disaster.
EXPLOSION RECONSTRUCTION OVER STONE TUNGUS
This strange and frightening event in all respects became known all over the world as the Tunguska phenomenon, the Tunguska catastrophe, the Tunguska body and many other names - loud, but in no way explaining the essence of what happened.
On June 30, 1908, at about 7 a.m. local time, a body, probably of extraterrestrial origin, exploded in the basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Eastern Siberia. The explosion was presumably caused by the destruction of this body in the lower atmosphere.
At first, for a few seconds, a blindingly bright fireball was seen moving across the sky from southeast to northwest. A powerful dust trail remained on the way of its movement, which remained for several hours. The meteorite explosion was heard at a distance of over 1000 km. Shaking of the soil and buildings was noted, window panes cracked. Many people and pets were knocked down by the air wave. Seismographs in Irkutsk and Western Europe recorded a seismic wave. And for several more days, an intense glow of the sky was observed in the territory from the Atlantic to central Siberia.
The area of the epicenter of the air explosion is still difficult to access today. And in those years it turned out to be an impossible task to organize a scientific expedition due to lack of funds.
Such an opportunity appeared only almost 20 years later, when the epicenter of events was first examined in 1927 by a Soviet expedition led by geologist Leonid Kulik (1883-1942). Even after many years, the picture was terrifying. A radial felling of a burnt forest around the epicenter was found within a radius of up to 30 km in the interfluve of Kimchu and Khushmo, tributaries of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, 65 km from the present Evenk village of Vanavara. Subsequently, there were also witnesses - the inhabitants of Vanavara and the Evenk nomads who were in the taiga.
In 1928-1930. were carried out two more expeditions of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and in 1938-1939. - aerial photography of the central part of the fallen forest area.
Both then and now all attempts to determine the nature of the Tunguska phenomenon were hampered by the fact that no significant meteorite debris or any other parts of the alien body were found on an area of about 2000 km2 devastated by the shock wave.
In 1995, the Tunguska State Nature Reserve was founded with a total area of 2965 km2. This area provides an opportunity for direct study of the environmental consequences of space disasters.
EVENT VERSIONS
All theories of the origin of the Tunguska phenomenon can be conditionally divided into two groups. The first contains those, the probability of which is high, but there is still a lack of evidence to prove them. The authorship of the second group of hypotheses belongs to ufologists and supporters of the existence of paranormal phenomena.
In 1975, the Commission on Meteorites and Space Dust of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences came to the conclusion that the Tunguska meteorite was a loose body, its density was no more than 10 times the density of air at the Earth's surface, which is why the explosion turned out to be so large-scale. The commission put forward a hypothesis that the Tunguska meteorite was a snowball with a radius of 300 m and a density of less than 0.01 g / cm3. At an altitude of about 10 km, the body turned into gas, and it dissipated in the atmosphere, which explains the bright nights in Western Siberia and in Europe after the observed event. The resulting shock wave then caused the felling of the forest. The commission changed the estimated dimensions of the celestial body several times, but this did not at all contradict the general conclusions.
The first group of theories also includes the assumption that the nucleus of a small comet could be over Nizhnaya Tunguska, which exploded when it invaded the dense layers of the atmosphere. The "comet theory" does not in the least contradict the conclusions of the 1975 commission, since, according to modern concepts, comets consist of frozen water and various gases with impurities of stony matter.
Much more exotic and calculated to attract attention are theories, one way or another related to alien intelligence.
In accordance with the hypothesis of the science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev, the Tunguska explosion on June 30, 1908 was caused by the accident of a Martian aircraft - a "planetary flight". This assumption spawned a new direction in science fiction literature.
Developing this theory, some researchers suggested that we can talk about a UFO with a thermonuclear power plant. Currently, the popular version is that a mysterious object flew in from the anti-world, and the catastrophe itself is the result of the interaction of the Earth with antimatter.
FUN FACTS
■ Hypotheses are considered even less probable, the authors of which tried to introduce something new into the study of the Tunguska phenomenon, many times exaggerating the possibility of manifestations of already known phenomena: from the explosion of a huge amount of swamp gas to a giant ball lightning. Calculations revealed that neither the Earth nor its atmosphere would have enough capacity to accumulate such an amount of gas or create such a large-scale electric discharge. And theories about the collision of the Earth with a black hole, a piece of plasma or a cloud of cosmic dust that have been torn off from the Sun, seem absolutely fantastic.
■ Expeditions of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR noted that the area of the fallen forest has a characteristic shape of a "butterfly" with spread "wings", "flying" from the east - southeast to west - northwest. The computer simulation of this area, taking into account all the circumstances of the fall, showed that the explosion did not occur when the body collided with the earth's surface, but even before that, in the air, at an altitude of 5-10 km.
■ In the peat bogs of the Podkamennaya Tunguska basin, silicate and magnetite balls were discovered, which could have been the remains of a celestial body. However, they were found very, very few, while in an explosion of such a force, the fragments should have been much larger. But even this does not in any way refute the version of the Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, according to which a body with high kinetic energy collided with the Earth, but had a low density (lower than the density of water), low strength and high volatility. All this led to its rapid destruction and evaporation as a result of a sharp deceleration in the lower dense layers of the atmosphere. And such a body could be a comet, consisting of frozen water and gases in the form of "snow" interspersed with refractory particles.
■ The 1927 expedition discovered round pits flooded with water in the central part of the radial felling of the forest. Leonid Kulik initially mistook them for meteorite craters. However, it was later established that these are natural formations, the origin of which is associated with permafrost.
■ A study of the consequences of the disaster showed that the energy of the explosion was 40-50 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is comparable to the energy of two thousand simultaneously detonated nuclear bombs, similar to those dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Later, in the center of the explosion, an increased growth of trees was found, indicating a radiation release ...
ATTRACTION
■ Natural: Tunguska State Nature Reserve (1995).
NUMBERS
Explosion power: OK. 40-50 Mt.
Height above sea level m .: approx. 250 m.
Distances: 685 to S.-V. from Krasnoyarsk, 3594 km east of Moscow.
GENERAL INFORMATION
Location: Eastern Siberia.
Administrator accessory: Evenki District, Krasnoyarsk Territory, RF.
Date of event: 30 June 1908
Airport: Yemelyanovo-Krasnoyarsk (int.).
Atlas. The whole world is in your hands №394
Probably, only the deaf person did not hear the name of the meteorite that fell in Siberia in the USSR. This unique event took place over a hundred years ago, on June 30, 1908. At about seven in the morning that day, the locals saw something inexplicable in the sky. True, all materials related to this incident were classified. This is probably why the people spread at times the most incredible stories about him, not confirmed by facts.
The name of the meteorite that fell in Siberia in the USSR, scientists came up with, based on the place of its landing. A space body fell in Eastern Siberia, in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Today it is the Evenki District in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. Therefore, the meteorite is known today to science as Tunguska.
As eyewitnesses of the incident described, first a dazzling ball-fireball appeared in the sky, which was moving to the northwest from the southeast. Its flight was accompanied by sounds that resembled thunder during a thunderstorm. A large meteorite was visible within a radius of eight hundred kilometers, and after itself it left a dust trail that persisted for several hours.
The light phenomena ended in a superpowerful explosion at an altitude of about seven to ten kilometers. Its energy was equal to the explosions of two thousand nuclear bombs, similar to those that were dropped on Hiroshima. This is ten to forty megatons. Fortunately, this territory is practically deserted. The only village of Vanavara is located here, and also during the fall in the taiga few nomad Evenks hunted.
Like all meteorites that fell to the ground, Tunguska knocked down trees in the forest about a radius of forty kilometers, both people and animals suffered. Further, a fire broke out from the light radiation, which covered an area equal to two thousand square kilometers.
The name of the meteorite that fell in Siberia in the USSR is today associated with a global catastrophe. After all, an explosive air wave went around the whole In Siberian villages, the soil and buildings were shaking, glass in windows cracked, objects flew from shelves, people fell from their feet. In all corners of the Northern Hemisphere, unusual atmospheric and optical phenomena were observed for several days, visible around the clock.
The first researcher of the Tunguska catastrophe, Leonid Kulik, in 1927, expressed the opinion that it was a large iron meteorite. However, he did not find a single fragment of the cosmic body. This allowed other scientists to put forward a hypothesis that an ice comet, an alien giant, fell in Siberia. Other opinions were also expressed, they say, it was an unsuccessful experiment by the physicist Nikola Tesla, a laser signal from an extraterrestrial civilization, and so on.
I carefully studied the incident, equipped expeditions, conducted aerial photography of the crash site. Professional scientists were often joined by amateurs and enthusiasts. However, splinters of the body that fell in the Podkamennaya Tunguska area have not yet been officially discovered.
The name of the meteorite that fell in Siberia in the USSR today means a phenomenon that has not been completely studied. In 1995, at the epicenter of a century-old explosion, a nature reserve of the Russian Federation, protected by the state, was established.