Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Tunguska Event (Encore)

Episode Date: June 20, 2021

In 1908, in the middle of the Siberian wilderness, near the Tunguska River, an explosion took place which was equivalent in size to the detonation of a 5 megaton nuclear bomb. But it wasn’t a nuclear bomb. Such things didn’t even exist then. It was a mystery that scientists are still trying to figure out today. Learn more about the Tunguska Event on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The following is an encore presentation of everything everywhere daily. I'll be back again tomorrow with another hand-picked, freshly squeezed audio episode for your enjoyment. In 1908, in the middle of the Siberian wilderness, near the Tunguska River, an explosion took place which was the equivalent in size to the detonation of a five-megat-ton nuclear bomb. But it wasn't a nuclear bomb. Such things didn't even exist then. It was a mystery that scientists are still trying to figure out today. Learn more about the Tunguska event on this episode of Everything. everything everywhere daily.

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The first video game was made on an oscilloscope in 1958. And every other topic under the sun. Look for Your Brain on Facts on your favorite podcast app or at your brainonfax.com. On June 30th, 1908, at around 7.17 a.m. local time, the earth witnessed one of the largest explosions in recorded human history. The explosion occurred in the remote forests of Siberia, near the Padkamanaya Tunguska River. Forty kilometers away from ground zero was the small community of Vanavara. This was the closest human settlement to what was the center of the explosion. One man sitting on a porch was blown off

his chair with intense heat, which felt as if his clothes was on fire. Despite the magnitude of the explosion, it isn't believed that there were any direct casualties from the blast due to its remoteness. One man died later from complications after being thrown into a tree, but that is the only death which can be confirmed to be attributed to the blast. Hundreds of kilometers away, windows were broken. Seismic stations around the world detected the blast. There was evidence of the event in stations as far as Berlin, London, Washington, and Indonesia. For the next two nights, there was a glow reported in Europe and Asia, which was bright enough to take photos. For something so major and so important, you'd think that scientists from all over the world would swarm

into the area to find out what happened. That, however, is not what happened. There was nothing. No research teams, no scientific explanations, zero. Russia had its own issues at the time, and getting to the middle of nowhere in Siberia wasn't easy. It wasn't until 13 years after the event that the first researcher bothered to visit. A geologist named Leonoyd Kulik visited the region in 1921. During this trip, he didn't get to the Central Impact Area, but he was able to see signs of the devastation over a decade after the event and was able to gather eyewitness testimony from the people who were there.

It was enough to convince Kulik that this was the result of a meteor strike and that the Soviet government should fund another more substantial expedition to the region to search. for fragments. In 1927, he returned with a larger team. They hired a team of indigenous hunters to take them to the impact zone. What they found was incredible. The explosion toppled an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,000 square kilometers. That is approximately the size of Luxembourg. While Luxembourg isn't a big country, it is huge for a blast area. The trees were all blown down in a radial pattern from the central impact zone. It was in the central impact zone where they found the biggest surprise of all. There was no crater. They expected to find a giant

hole in the ground where the meteor hit. Such a thing didn't exist. Moreover, they couldn't find any traces of meteor metal anywhere. In the central zone, they found trees that were still standing and burnt, but oddly had all the branches and bark removed. They were like telephone poles. In the 1960s, photographs of the region showed that the area of felled trees had actually been the shape of a butterfly with two lobed regions. The mysteries of the site fueled speculation and theories for decades. The initial theory was that the ground was very soft and that the heavy meteor sank into the ground and that the land quickly rebounded covering up any crater.

However, subsequent scans with better technology found no heavy metals in the area. The other big theory is that it was a small comet that impacted and because it was made of ice, it disintegrated before it made contact with the ground. The force wave from the incoming comet caused the damage, but it didn't leave a crater. Trader. Other theories have included tiny black holes, antimatter, and of course, aliens. You can't have crazy theories without aliens. So what did happen? There's no way to know for certain, but there have been several developments that have allowed for some insight into the events of 1908. First, stripped standing trees is something that was observed after the Hiroshima explosion and after

other nuclear tests. It is consistent with a massive airborne explosion. The shock waves hit the branches before the trunk of the tree could react, and they're stripped away. Also, if the shockwave is coming from directly overhead, it won't provide much lateral force to knock it over, so it stands upright. Second, in 1963, an explosives test was done in the rainforests of Cape York, Australia. They wanted to see what would happen as such a forest with a large explosion. They detonated 50 tons of conventional explosives and found a pattern in the trees which was consistent with the butterfly pattern found in Siberia.

Third, another meteor impact in Russia, this time in 2013, outside the town of Cheblenisk, was captured on video by dozens of cameras, and they were able to get measurements that helped determine what happened 105 years earlier. The Chellabinsk event was only about one-tenth the size of the Tenguska event. You might have seen videos of this floating around the internet. If not, you can easily find them doing a quick search, and the footage is fascinating and frightening. Finally, with all of the above information, Russian researchers have been able to create a more accurate computer model to get a better idea of what happened and to come up with a theory that's consistent with all the known facts. In 2020, they released a theory that seems to check all of the boxes. Their theory is that it was a meteor, but it came into the Earth's atmosphere at a very shallow angle, which caused it to skip back into space.

If you've ever watched Apollo 13 or another documentary on the space program, you might have heard them talk about how they have to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at exactly the right angle, too steep and they burn up, too shallow, and they skip off into space. The Tunguska event, according to this theory, was a case of the latter. It came in shallow, enough to cause an enormous pressure wave in one direction, which caused the butterfly shape on the ground, but then skipped off out of the atmosphere, which is why there was never a crater. If true, that means that the object which is responsible for the Tunguska event is still out there orbiting the sun. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackler. I just want to give a big thank you to everyone who listens to the show. The show has recently passed 30,000 downloads, and it is growing rapidly. The biggest day and week of downloads in the show's history was just this past week,

and this wouldn't be possible without all of you.