100 years ago today, the Tunguska event, probably a small asteroid exploding in the atmosphere, happened over Siberia.
That goodness that didn’t happen h
The anniversary got a run in the “On this Day” column here in yesterday’s paper.
Researchers have apparently confirmed the meteorite theory.
Coincidentally, today also marks the 100th anniversary of the morse code S.O.S. signal.
I wrote an article about this whikle an undergraduate, which I was never able to get published. But learned a lot.
It’s not at all clear to me from the article mindfield quotes exactly how “acid rain” of any sort proves this was an asteroid – You’d think Whipple’s hypothetical comet could have brought nitrogen as well. (Although the balance of opinion has been shifting towards asteroid for many years now)Guess I’ll have to read the article.
Kulik never found a crater, it’s true, but neither did anyone else. That lack of a crater was why so many people thought that something other than an asteroid was involved. Although not many people know it (and, to my knowledge, no secondary sources report it), Kulik did claim to have found a tiny piece of meteorite. Decades later, around 1960, Russian teams found huge numbers of micrometeorites scattered in an ellipse to the northwest of the center of the blast, of both stony and metallic composition and bearing the signs of being melted by very high temperatures.
You know, another “event” might not be such a bad thing. Think of it as a chance for a “clean install” for life on earth.
Well, if we’re talking another Tunguska-sized event it could certainly wipe out a major city and much of the surrounding suburbs, but that might be only 10-20 million people. It’d be the single worst disaster in recorded history, to be sure, but barely a drop in the bucket with respect to the total world population.
Damn! You guys beat me to that. There’s another article about it here.
I thought it was aliens?
I don’t really think the article is meant to distinguish between meteoroid and comet fragment, merely between ‘chunk of rock falling from the skies’ and spaceship, antimatter or mini black hole (and whatever else harebrained explanation may have cropped up).
No, it was Tesla’s 1908-style Death Ray.
What did Tesla have against Russian trees?
According to Morozko, Russian trees beat you up, follow you into your house, and try to shove you in an oven.
Bastards.
Aliens invented the SOS? Was that before or after they crashed in Siberia?
Actually, he was 4 hrs and 47 minutes too early (bad timer. He used a 1907 version). (read the article to find out what would have happened at the real scheduled time).
His lifelong hate of things with Peter in the name, however, was undaunted.
“Save Our Saucer.”
A couple of seconds before.