In the summer of 1908, Semen Semenov was having her usual breakfast on the porch of her home in the town of Vanavara (Krasnoyarsk, Russia), where the sun was sparse in cold Siberia. Suddenly, far to the north, he saw how a blue light split the sky in two, engulfing the trees of the river forest with fire. Tunguska. Blinded by the strange light that was illuminating the sky more and more, Semenov was slow to notice that the heat was beginning to invade his body. It was as if he had entered Hell himself. He was desperately trying to tear off his shirt. Suddenly, he heard an intense roar from the forest and felt a powerful force that caused him to literally fly several meters until he hit a wall and passed out. At this time, a great shaking accompanied by a high-pitched sound, like falling rocks out of control, shook his entire house. A strong hot wind blew through houses, crops and roads, damaging everything in its path.
Semenov is the memory of many other residents of Siberia at the beginning of the 20th century. This man, among others, is the witness one of the largest documented eruptions in human history and his testimony is reflected in the discovery diaries of the Russian scientist Leonid Kulik in 1930.
What happened? On June 30, 1908, villages near the stony Tunguska River in the remote Krasnoyarsk region of Russia, The explosion that destroyed 80 million trees in an area of 2 thousand 150 square kilometersthat is, more than the entire surface of the island of Tenerife.
The incident quickly swept the world. But it wasn’t precisely because countries enjoyed excellent communication as they do today. the rumble can be directly ‘felt’ at all seismic stations around the world and the next two days the nights were so bright, You can read a newspaper on the street at midnight in London.
It exploded in the air without touching the ground
The disaster has been studied countless times, but no one has been able to elucidate the origin of the phenomenon even after a hundred years. Today, the event is attributed to a meteorite explosion and is classified as an impact event, but the crater it should have caused was never found. The latest theories disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometersinstead of crashing into the Earth’s surface.
Since 1908, when the event occurred, about a thousand scientific papers (mostly in Russian) have been published on the Tunguska eruption. The person most devoted to seeking answers, Russian geologist Leonid Kulik. His work began in 1921, but six years later, in 1927, he made his first scientific expedition to the region.
He hired local hunters to take his team to the center of the eruption site, where they hoped to find an impact crater, as it was an inhospitable and difficult to explore area. He was surprised that there were no craters or footprints to prove any collision. In fact, the only thing they could identify – and this was Kulik’s wonderful discovery – was the epicenter of the eruption, determined from the radial pattern shown by the felled trees in the area.
In the absence of strong and clear answers, Tunguska incident remains a mystery often serving to support myths and legends that have little to do with reality.
One of the weirdest theories arose in 2004, when a group of Russian scientists claimed that what actually collided with Earth was not a meteorite, but an alien spacecraft.
Or an asteroid or a comet
Regardless, scientists haven’t given up on trying to determine what type of object the object that hit the Earth was. Right now, two are the main suspects: an asteroid or a comet. And teams sent to the area in the 1950s and 1960s found microscopic spheres of silicate and magnetite in the soil sieves, revealing what hit them. extraterrestrial origin.
In 2013, another research team published the results of the analysis of micro-samples taken from a peat bog near the center of the affected area, showing tiny bits of material. meteorite origin.
A study published in June 2020 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society He proposed a new hypothesis that concluded what would affect Tunguska. a large iron asteroid that will enter the atmosphere at a relatively low altitude and then reappear and the shock wave devastated part of the earth’s surface. So the asteroid would never have fallen to Earth.
Other scientists claim czecho lake -oval and about 450 meters long- it is actually a wound opened by the low-speed impact of a 10-meter-diameter rock. In their favor, they add that there is no evidence – testimonies or maps – that this lake existed before 1928.
A hundred years after the catastrophe that left Semenov feeling close to the gates of hell, the Tunguska mystery remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries waiting to be clarified.
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