By: Connor Bryant
Do you like a good unsolved mystery? How about one with a mysterious explosion, massive devastation, and weird theories? The Tunguska Event has all of these and more. The cause of the event has been a mystery for the past hundred and twelve years.The Tunguska Event is a great example of an unsolved mystery.
The Tunguska Event was a mysterious explosion in a pine forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. The event happened on June 30, 1908 at 7:14 am.The explosion destroyed about eight hundred square miles of forest. Some eighty million trees were charred and all knocked over on their side. Hundreds of reindeer were killed from the blast. The explosion had one hundred eighty five times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The Tunguska region of Siberia is a very remote place with very few people living there. It has long hard winters and short summers. During the summer the ground becomes very swampy and muddy. The forest because of these conditions was so hard to get to, it took twenty years for someone to investigate the explosion.
There are many different theories about what caused the explosion. One theory is that an asteroid crashed into the Earth. In 1921, Lenonid Kulik, a Russian mineralogist, took a team to the Podkamennaya Tunguska River basin and conducted a survey. They never visited the center of the blast area, but because of the many local people’s stories, Kulik believed that the explosion had been caused by a giant meteor impact. However he could not explain why there was not an impact crater that would have been made from a large meteor. Another meteor theory is that one actually exploded in the atmosphere causing an air burst above the Earth’s surface instead of crashing into the Earth’s surface. A different impact theory came from Russian scientists. They believe it was a comet and not a meteor that caused the damage. They believe this because comets are largely made up of ice instead of rock, like meteorites. The ice would have started to evaporate as it entered Earth's atmosphere, and continue to do so until it hit the ground. The only problem with this theory is that even a large comet would probably evaporate before reaching the Earth’s surface.The locals nearby had their own theory. They believed the explosion was a visit by a russian god Ogdy, who had cursed the area by smashing trees and killing animals. A more recent theory is from 2013 when a team of researchers published the results of an analysis of micro-samples from a peat bog near the center of the affected area which showed fragments that may have an extraterrestrial origin.
The Tunguska Event is still a mystery even today. Lenonid Kulik later returned to the actual blast area in 1927. He did not find a crater where the impact was nor any meteor fragments. He did find a five mile area where the trees were burnt, they had no branches or bark, and were still standing upright. Trees that were further away from the center had been only a little scorched and were knocked down in a direction facing away from the center. This created a large butterfly pattern of downed trees. The locals told Kulik,” that the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire.” One man said he was hurled from his chair and his shirt felt like it was on fire from the intense heat. According to earthsky.org, people that lived in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal said,
“They saw a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the sun, moving across the sky. About ten minutes later, there was a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire.” People that were closer to the explosion said, “That the source of the sound moved from the east to the north of them.”The sounds were then followed by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows. People thirty five miles away felt the heat from the blast. The cause of the explosion is still unknown. This explosion was the most powerful blast ever in recorded history. Seismic activity was even felt as far away as the United Kingdom. Another strange fact about this explosion is that if it was from an asteroid, why is there no impact crater? Why were there no large fragments or debris found?
The Tunguska Event is a great mystery because it has been a hundred and twelve years since it happened and it is still unsolved. The theories as to what caused the explosion range from the scientific to the bizarre. The fact that the trees were still charred and did not have any bark or leaves, even twenty years after the explosion is unbelievable. Also where is the impact crater from the supposed asteroid? These reasons are why I think this mystery is a great one.