I have been extraordinarily busy over the past few weeks, and have been having problems getting access to the Board, so I haven’t been replying, but
1.) The journal article reporting the microspheres was circa 1960 in a professional journal devoted to astronomy. They showed an elliptical distribution of microparticles. Considering that the authors were professionals, and found this evidence compelling, they clearly felt that they had found a concentration of such particles in the vicinity of the Tunguska event. Exactly how they determined the distribution, how they sampled it, and why they thought it was confined to that area, I do not know. I haven’t seen the paper in a long time. I’ll have to dig it out, or search for it online. But it is clear from the piece and their writing that they did not consider it “a tiny fraction”
- The elliptical distribution shows it confined to the area, and consistent with the local event, rather than due to a vapor trail – which is what YOU are crowing about. Certainly there was large-scale dust injected into the atmosphere – it was responsible for nacreous clouds and bright skies throughout the night. That, I think, is consistent with the Vapor Trail – but I wouldn’t expect that to produce a local explosion. Speculation was that the dust in the atmosphere was connected with the tail of the Pons-Winneke comet (which the “meteorite” probably was, too. There was another meteorite fall reported on the same day, by the way.)