dChan
Anonymous ID: 1ab1ef March 1, 2022, 4 p.m. No.15757021   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>7168

The Tunguska Event

 

The Tunguska event (occasionally also called the Tunguska incident) was a tremendous ~12 megaton[2] explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of June 30, 1908.[1][3] The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event.[4][5][6][7][2] The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony meteoroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size.[2][8]: p. 178  The meteoroid approached from the east-southeast, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s (60,000 mph) (~Ma 80).[2] It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth.[9]

 

The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, though much larger impacts have occurred in prehistoric times. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area.[10] It has been mentioned numerous times in popular culture, and has also inspired real-world discussion of asteroid impact avoidance.[citation needed]

 

Description

 

Location of the event in Siberia (modern map)

On 30 June 1908 (N. S.) (cited in Russia as 17 June 1908, O. S., before the implementation of the Soviet calendar in 1918), at around 07:17 local time, Evenki natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a bluish light, nearly as bright as the sun, moving across the sky and leaving a thin trail. Closer to the horizon, there was a flash producing a billowing cloud, followed by a pillar of fire that cast a red light on the landscape. The pillar split in two and faded, turning to black. About ten minutes later, there was a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported that the source of the sound moved from the east to the north of them. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometres away.[2]

 

The explosion registered at seismic stations across Eurasia, and air waves from the blast were detected in Germany, Denmark, Croatia, and the United Kingdom—and as far away as Batavia, Dutch East Indies, and Washington, D.C.[11] It is estimated that, in some places, the resulting shock wave was equivalent to an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale.[12] Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe were aglow.[13] There are contemporaneous reports of brightly lit photographs being successfully taken at midnight (without the aid of flashbulbs) in Sweden and Scotland.[11] It has been theorized that this sustained glowing effect was due to light passing through high-altitude ice particles that had formed at extremely low temperatures as a result of the explosion—a phenomenon that decades later was reproduced by space shuttles.[14][15] In the United States, a Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory program at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California observed a months-long decrease in atmospheric transparency consistent with an increase in suspended dust particles.[16]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

https://www.britannica.com/event/Tunguska-event