High Impact Anniversary

This coming Monday June 30th is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska blast! Now thought to be from air-burst comet pieces, I remember the discussions as a kid about the idea that it could have been a particle of anti- matter. That was tough to get a grip on, a comet I can picture.

Last Monday I went for an early morning run with Jon H. who wanted to aerate his system in preparation for boarding a flight to Frankfurt,connecting to Moscow and from there to Krasnojarsk in Central Siberia to present two papers at a scientific conference on the Tunguska impact. He will have an opportunity to helicopter into the remote Tunguska region for a field trip. We expect pictures!

Here is the beginning of an Scientific American article well worth reading, summarizing past thinking on the event as well as current findings:

"June 30, 1908, 7:14 a.m., central Siberia
Semen Semenov, a local farmer, saw “the sky split in two. Fire appeared high
and wide over the forest. . . . From . . . where the fire was,
came strong heat. . . . Then the sky shut closed, and a strong
thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards.... After that such
noise came, as if . . . cannons were firing, the earth shook ...”
Such is the harrowing testimony of one of the closest eyewitnesses
to what scientists call the Tunguska event, the largest
impact of a cosmic body to occur on the earth during modern
human history. Semenov experienced a raging conflagration some
65 kilometers (40 miles) from ground zero, but the effects of the
blast rippled out far into northern Europe and Central Asia as
well. Some people saw massive, silvery clouds and brilliant, colored
sunsets on the horizon, whereas others witnessed luminescent
skies at night—Londoners, for instance, could plainly read
newsprint at midnight without artificial lights. Geophysical
observatories placed the source of the anomalous seismic and
pressure waves they had recorded in a remote section of Siberia.
The epicenter lay close to the river Podkamennaya Tunguska, an
uninhabited area of swampy taiga forest that stays frozen for eight
or nine months of the year......Read the rest of the Scientific American Article HERE