Do you know anything about the Siberian explosion that ripped through the air above a remote forest near Podkamennaya Tunguska river? If you have no idea about it, worry not; we are here to guide you and explain to you the reasons for the explosion.
Siberian explosion
The explosion occurred in a remote forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia on 30th June 1908. A 50 – 100m wide fireball came out of nowhere and depleted 2,000 sq km area of the taiga forest. Not just this, it also flattened about 80 million trees of the woods.
The effects of the Earth’s trembling explosion were experienced in over 60km distance from its occurrence point. Not just the trembling of the Earth, people also experienced the heat of the blast. However, no severe effect of the explosion on humans was reported, but a local deer died because of the blast. The number of reindeers in the forest was reduced to charred carcasses.
The local people noticed that the sky was split into two parts, and at a considerable distance from the forest, the whole northern part of the sky was seen, and it was covered with fire. The explosion followed by a noise of something like stones falling from the sky or firing of the guns.
The record
The Tunguska event is the most powerful explosion ever recorded in the history that produced over 185 times more energy than the atom bomb event of Hiroshima. The seismic thunder under the Earth’s surface was observed in as far away as the UK. But still, there is no evidence of how the explosion occurred. According to a few people, asteroid or comet were responsible for the Tunguska event. However, very few traces of any large extraterrestrial object was ever found, which formed the basis of the explanation of the explosion.
The research
A few decades later, in 1927, Leonid Kulik, along with his Russian team, made a trip to the area of the Tunguska event. Even after almost 20 years of the attack, the damage of the explosion was still quite evident.
Kulik noticed that a large area of around 50kms of flattened trees was strangely shaped in a butterfly design. He suggested that an extraterrestrial meteor exploded in the atmosphere and became the base of this explosion. But Kulik was surprised that there were no meteoric remnants anywhere around the area of the attack. He explained it and stated that the swampy ground of the attack was too soft to preserve the signs of any collision.
However, another Russian researcher stated that the attack occurred because of the comet and not because of the meteor. Comets are mostly made up of ice, so the absence of the evidence makes sense as the ice gets evaporated and gets into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Winding up
There might not be any proof of the reason for the Tunguska event, but it does not matter. The research is still going on to determine whether it was the result of a meteor or comet.
