The Tunguska Explosion - What was it?

Palomar · 2003-07-15 08:54:39

I thought the supposed Tesla connection was interesting, but I'm inclined to believe it was a meteor which exploded over the area. Last year my husband and I watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel regarding this event. A butterfly pattern of fallen trees showed up in some sort of scan scientists did. A bomb detonation was ruled out by these same scientists, for lack of radiation symptoms in the area comparable to nuclear fallout (not to mention this occured 3 decades before Trinity) and lack of any (even tiny) metal shards or fragments discovered by the earliest expeditions to the site.

So...what do you think?

--Cindy

sethmckiness · 2003-07-15 10:02:46

I do not want to be a complete ass, but I have never read something that was quite so mistaken on the nature of RF energy or Static Electricity. I had always heard it was an Air-Burst meteorite.

prometheusunbound · 2003-07-15 12:23:20

last I read on asteroids was that most are actually large gravel piles held together by gravity or ice. perhaps one of these distengerated as it fell through the atomphere and that would explain everything, including the explosion (a lot of matter travelling really, realy fast can make a lot of noise energy. . . .

Ian · 2003-07-17 20:07:38

Read me
I thought the supposed Tesla connection was interesting, but I'm inclined to believe it was a meteor which exploded over the area. Last year my husband and I watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel regarding this event. A butterfly pattern of fallen trees showed up in some sort of scan scientists did. A bomb detonation was ruled out by these same scientists, for lack of radiation symptoms in the area comparable to nuclear fallout (not to mention this occured 3 decades before Trinity) and lack of any (even tiny) metal shards or fragments discovered by the earliest expeditions to the site.
So...what do you think?
--Cindy

Was it a comet? What would make the trees at ground zero be flattened radially outward? Why are there no pieces of the asteroid or meteor there? And How big waas the thing that hit tunguska?

Ian · 2003-07-17 20:11:50

I do not want to be a complete ass, but I have never read something that was quite so mistaken on the nature of RF energy or Static Electricity. I had always heard it was an Air-Burst meteorite.

What would an air burst meteorite look like? How big of an explosion would it make to produce a big shockwave of dust like Carl Sagan said in Cosmos? Obviously a small meteorite wouldn't make that big of an explosion. So what else could it be? You said something about RF energy or Static Electricity. Where did you hear that?

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sethmckiness · 2003-07-18 05:29:05

What would an air burst meteorite look like? How big of an explosion would it make to produce a big shockwave of dust like Carl Sagan said in Cosmos? Obviously a small meteorite wouldn't make that big of an explosion. So what else could it be?

A meteorite the size of a bus going 20-60,000 miles per hour contains a lot of energy. That should be more then enough to explain a Kiloton size blast.

sethmckiness · 2003-07-18 05:39:37

I was wrong, it was believed to be 100-meters in diameter.

prometheusunbound · 2003-07-18 09:05:58

if the asteroid was nothing but a gravel pile (as most asteroids are) then that would explain why nothing is there. It was all anhilated or turned into dust by the impact (most of it anyways) and any remaints would be extremly difficult to find.

Palomar · 2003-07-18 16:07:23

Was it a comet? What would make the trees at ground zero be flattened radially outward? Why are there no pieces of the asteroid or meteor there? And How big waas the thing that hit tunguska?

*It having been a comet was also considered, but majority opinion in the scientific community favors a meteor which exploded above the site, just before impact (there is no meteor crater).

The wind-sheer from the blast is believed to have been what flattened out the trees...and knocked horses off their feet miles away. Wow.

Also, the night following the explosion, the whole area was bathed in a weird glow; witnesses said it was like daylight all night long.

No pieces of the meteor were found even during the first expeditions to the site; again, it's believed the meteor disintegrated when it exploded...if that's what happened. How big? Don't know.

--Cindy

Ian · 2003-07-22 08:22:14

*It having been a comet was also considered, but majority opinion in the scientific community favors a meteor which exploded above the site, just before impact (there is no meteor crater).

The wind-sheer from the blast is believed to have been what flattened out the trees...and knocked horses off their feet miles away. Wow.

Also, the night following the explosion, the whole area was bathed in a weird glow; witnesses said it was like daylight all night long.

No pieces of the meteor were found even during the first expeditions to the site; again, it's believed the meteor disintegrated when it exploded...if that's what happened. How big? Don't know.

--Cindy
What about the shockwave that Carl Sagan said spread all the way to London after the explosion? Maybe the weird glow was sunlight being reflected from the dust in the explosion to the ground making it seem as if it were daylight. I heard on cosmos that people could read by the light from that dust in London. I think that there is a picture of that light that the people could read by in London then in the book "Comet" By Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Also, how could it have exploded above the impact site? What would have caused that to happen? Where did you hear that?

Palomar · 2003-07-22 08:59:51

What about the shockwave that Carl Sagan said spread all the way to London after the explosion? Maybe the weird glow was sunlight being reflected from the dust in the explosion to the ground making it seem as if it were daylight. I heard on cosmos that people could read by the light from that dust in London. I think that there is a picture of that light that the people could read by in London then in the book "Comet" By Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Also, how could it have exploded above the impact site? What would have caused that to happen? Where did you hear that?

*Well, I'm not familiar with Sagan's "take" on the incident.

The source I'm referring to was a documentary on the Discovery Channel, which I watched about a year ago now, so I can't remember all the details.

Maybe you could search the Discovery Channel web site; they probably have the documentary archived.

--Cindy

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Ian · 2003-07-22 13:12:56

How could it explode without hitting the ground?

Ian · 2003-07-22 13:14:47

The link that you put there wasn't a discovery channel website.

Palomar · 2003-07-22 13:20:31

The link that you put there wasn't a discovery channel website.

*I didn't say it was. And we've got a communication gap going...the link I provided in the 1st post deals with the same topic. My comments related to it, from the show on the Discovery Channel of about a year ago.

Ian, I posted this in order to get further answers and share information...I never claimed to know all the facts of the matter, okay?

--Cindy

Ian · 2003-07-23 07:17:32

"last I read on asteroids was that most are actually large gravel piles held together by gravity or ice. perhaps one of these distengerated as it fell through the atomphere and that would explain everything, including the explosion (a lot of matter travelling really, realy fast can make a lot of noise energy. . . ."

If it could explode without hitting the ground it would be pretty small and if it wasn't small it would probably be moving pretty slowly in order to explode close to the ground but not on the ground. If it didn't explode it could have been a comet. Could that explain a lot? That's the explanation they used in "Cosmos". Could it have been a comet that passed by the ground and made the "Shock Wave" that Carl Sagan talked about. There's a picture of light from that explosion in the book "Comet" and that light was in London and it was night over there in the year 1908. What does anyone think about that?

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Shaun Barrett · 2003-07-23 07:52:35

I don't buy the Tesla energy-weapon thing. It sounds like Tesla was grasping at straws towards the end and may have deliberately made insinuations that the 1908 incident in Tunguska was his doing, or at least that he had already built the kind of machine which could do such damage. I suspect he was a troubled man in his later years, having already had a nervous breakdown.

The most plausible explanation I've read for the Tunguska explosion is that a 30 metre diameter stony meteor, travelling at about 15 kms/sec, self-destructed at an altitude of some 6 kms.
It seems there is a perfectly reasonable cause for the catastrophic disintegration of such an object. Apparently, when a meteor hits the dense lower regions of the atmosphere at high velocity, it receives an enormous shock - akin to the effect experienced by a diver doing a belly-flop off a diving board. In addition, the inside of the meteor is intensely cold from its journey through space, while its exterior is heated to very high temperatures by friction with the upper atmosphere. Such a temperature differential sets up stresses in the rock, making it more susceptible to the effect of the shock wave.

The sudden, explosive disintegration of the Tunguska object would have released all of its enormous kinetic energy (energy of motion) in just fractions of a second. Much of this energy would have been in the form of heat - a fireball very much like that of a nuclear detonation.
Rough calculations indicate Tunguska experienced an explosion with maybe 60 times the energy of the Hiroshima fission bomb! i.e. Equal to a powerful hydrogen bomb in magnitude.

Good evidence that the meteor was stony came from studies of the trees near ground-zero, which were found to have fragments of stone in their scorched bark. The stone's composition was found to match that of known stony meteorites.

There are various credible eyewitness accounts that describe a fiery object blazing a trail across the sky before the explosion, and there's the hard evidence of the stone fragments in the trees. These two facts are persuasive showstoppers for the notion that Tesla had anything to do with the incident.

It looks like another urban myth has bitten the dust!

Incidentally, it's been speculated that if the stony meteor in question had arrived just a few hours later, it would have exploded over western Europe, perhaps over Paris or London. The consequences of that don't bear thinking about.

Ian · 2003-07-23 11:26:24

Has anybody ever gathered samples of the stones that you say were on the tops of the trees there? If so, are they very similar to the meteorites that are in museums like the one in the Franklin Institute? Could somebody compare them and see if the same chemical elements are in both of these meteorites?

Mark Friedenbach · 2003-07-23 17:33:50

IIRC, the soviets pretty much solved the problem in the 60's. The explosion did not flatten trees in a circle, but instead in a weird butterfly pattern. Back then the russians showed by experiment that a large exploding object moving at very high speed towards the ground, at an angle, would create that exact butterfly pattern (they used explosives going off over a mini forest made with matchsticks). They also found that the angle the object would have hit at was parallel to the ecliptic plane. If you couple that with the iridium they found at the site, I can't see any reason to believe it wasn't a meteor.

I wish I could remember the name of the scientist that did the matchstick test though, 'cause I can't seem to find any websites about it..

Shaun Barrett · 2003-07-23 20:03:48

Yes, Ian.
Apparently, the elemental make-up of the tiny particles of stone recovered from the trees in the area was found to match that of known stony meteorites.
It seems to be a "Case Closed" scenario as far as I can see.

According to some estimates, Earth should receive a hit from something like the Tunguska object about every couple of centuries, or less, on average.
The U.S. military detected a somewhat less energetic explosion in the atmosphere over the Pacific in 1972, which has been attributed to another stony meteor. And I've seen amateur movie footage of a meteor streaking across the sky above a Canadian lake one summer, again in the seventies I believe. That one only skimmed through the upper atmosphere and headed back out into space - a near miss!

Fortunately, in comparison to Earth's vast areas of ocean and huge areas of uninhabited land, populated regions present a much smaller target. Most meteoric airbursts and meteoritic impacts occur away from towns and cities ... thank God!

dickbill · 2003-07-25 11:53:52

a similar event and in the same region, in sept. 2002 , how unlikely !

a meteorite crashed, leaving several craters on the ground, the biggest being 20 meters. Habitants report a glow from the crater region, visible at distance, after the impact (forest fires ?) and mention radioactivity ???.
That's from AFP, Yahoo france, I cannot find the link in yahoo.com.

http://fr.news.yahoo.com/030725/202/3bhh1.html

Shaun Barrett · 2003-07-25 20:33:13

Well, coincidences do happen. There's no reason a meteorite shouldn't fall in Siberia in 2002 just because of the 1908 airburst.

The reports of radioactivity are interesting though because there were disputed reports of radioactivity in the soil at Tunguska also.
This makes me wonder about our knowledge of nuclear reactions. The phenomenon of cold fusion has been officially dismissed by conventional science as nonsense. However, there have been numerous anomalous experimental results which seem to show that some kind of nuclear reaction may occur at room temperature in a glass jar. Unfortunately, such results have not been reliably reproducible. Since reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of scientific credibility, cold fusion cannot be admitted into the realm of science and must remain a mere curiosity - though to many, including me, a most intriguing curiosity! :;):

During the passage of a massive object through our atmosphere at very high velocity, the enormous temperatures generated and the energy released could conceivably give rise to reactions of a nuclear nature. I can imagine a region in front of the object where atmospheric water vapour is broken down, ionised, and compressed to pressures of hundreds of thousands of atmospheres. Conditions in such a region might closely resemble the plasma produced in our experimental fusion reactors. Who is to say that mother nature cannot produce fusion reactions on a small scale during the few moments of a meteoric airburst?
This might account for these reports of radioactivity, without recourse to speculation about nuclear-powered starships travelling light years across the abyss of space without mishap, only to blow up when they arrive at their destination! How frustrating for their occupants!!

Sorry, I couldn't help that little joke! I know I shouldn't make fun of things I don't fully understand, but it just strikes me as so very unlikely that extraterrestrials could be advanced enough to achieve interstellar travel but be unable to control their nuclear engines at the last minute, and crash!
It makes for good science-fiction, but Occam's Razor dictates that we examine more plausible possibilities first.

dickbill · 2003-07-25 22:05:40

During the passage of a massive object through our atmosphere at very high velocity, the enormous temperatures generated and the energy released could conceivably give rise to reactions of a nuclear nature. I can imagine a region in front of the object where atmospheric water vapour is broken down, ionised, and compressed to pressures of hundreds of thousands of atmospheres.

Maybe, but I thought that millions of degree, not thousands, were required for hydrogen to undergo nuclear fusion. But I don't know about other exotic elements that could be presents in the meteor, like more unstable isotopes. After all, these elements don't have to fusion straight, we can imagine that some unstable elements, like U235, due to the huge pressure, undergo fission first, which in turn could trigger a fusion.
Well, maybe the simplest explanation for radioactivity is that there are radioactive elements aboard the meteorite.
It's not impossible to find heavy element in a meteorite, think about the irridium story and the dinosaurs.

Also, about the diseases the habitants mention (they also say that all the animals avoid the region at the exeption of young bears). Could it be a little bit psycho-somatic or something to attract the tourists ( the locals probably want their own Area51) ?
And the dust provoked by the meteorit explosion, could contain some organic elements (formamide etc) that could be highly allergenic or even cancerigen. The air was probably full of that dust of microparticles since the story talk about a giant meteor which could possibly protect these organic molecules.

But again, I am suspicious, twice the same meteorit in the same area...that's strange, either the vodka or the "area51 attraction park concept" might have helped.

prometheusunbound · 2003-07-27 19:00:51

Maybe, but I thought that millions of degree, not thousands, were required for hydrogen to undergo nuclear fusion. But I don't know about other exotic elements that could be presents in the meteor, like more unstable isotopes. After all, these elements don't have to fusion straight, we can imagine that some unstable elements, like U235, due to the huge pressure, undergo fission first, which in turn could trigger a fusion.

Good point! But, then again, the metor could have been traveling incredibally fast, way faster than human reentrys. In short, it could have been traveling at high velocitys, enough to produce that sort of pressure.

Shaun Barrett · 2003-07-27 19:50:49

I agree with you, Prometheusunbound. As usual, Dickbill has raised good points.
In response, I believe that to trigger a fusion reaction, all that is required is to bring protons close enough for the strong nuclear force to come into play, thus overpowering the electro-magnetic repulsive force.
With our fusion bombs, we use a fission bomb as the detonator to create temperatures in the 100,000,000 degree range. This gives the hydrogen nuclei (protons) enough velocity to overcome the +ve/+ve repulsion and combine (or fuse).
In the centre of the Sun, on the other hand, fusion takes place at the relatively low temperature of about 20,000,000 degrees (almost overcoat and scarf weather! ) because of the ambient pressure, which is enormous.

Now, here's where my argument may very well break down - since I don't know the figures for temperature and pressure just in front of a meteor travelling at 15 kms/sec through the densest parts Earth's atmosphere - but I speculate that the combination of heat and pressure may be just sufficient to cause at least some fusion to occur (? ), which I think is also the point Prometheusunbound is making.

I am quite ready and willing to be shot down in flames on this point. I raised the issue merely as an attempt to explain the reported radioactivity at or near the sites of these phenomena.
Dickbill's alternative explanations for the radioactivity may well be more plausible. I simply don't know.
However, I think his explanations or mine are very much more likely than the 'stricken, extraterrestrial, nuclear-powered, interstellar spaceship' story!!
:;):

[Mind you, I suppose stranger things may have happened! ??? ]

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Re: The Tunguska Explosion - What was it?

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