Stuff You Should Know - What was the Tunguska event?

Episode Date: January 3, 2019

In 1908, the most powerful meteoroid explosion in recorded history happened over a remote area of Siberia. But the weird thing is there was no impact crater and no asteroid to be found – so was it an asteroid? (Yes.) Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there, the trio known as Stuff You Should Know. The trio. Jerry came to our live show. I know. I'm still a little giddy and in amazement. It's been a while, Jerry's. I mean, I know it's not personal, but remember she used to actually go on tour with us before

she got a family. Before she checked out. Yeah. Decided she loved other people more than us. I'd also like to point out the fact that Jerry is writhing in discomfort right now, Chuck. You were really sticking a tour. No, she's fine. Well, it was a great show, probably because Jerry was there, and everybody, well, I guess

you would have heard it by now because these are coming out after Christmas. Time warp. Yeah. Let's do the time warp dance, Chuck. And everybody's like, gee, it should be nice to see some of the things you're talking about, which you can do maybe next year. You mean in person? Yeah.

You want to do another live Christmas show? Sure. Yeah. I'm done with that. I mean, we paid money for Christmas decorations. We did. I feel like we need to reuse those. Yeah.

Hopefully, everybody has heard it already, and now they're like, yes, I know exactly what these guys are talking about, and I'm enjoying this horribly awkward intro diversion. No, it's not awkward. Speaking of intro diversions, Chuck, I want to mention two things, okay? You know, the Stuff Network has a ton of really good shows, and there's one that I was on recently called Behind the Bastards. I was on a two-parter. Nice.

It was nice. So Robert Evans is the host, and he basically just does tons of research about some of the worst human beings who have ever lived, many of whom are celebrated in some quarters, and he just kind of tears them down to size. Did you do a show on me? No. You're just celebrated. There's no tearing you down.

Oh, I'm sure people tear me down. I don't care. The ones that I sat in on were based on scientific racism, the history of scientific racism, and how it's been used to justify colonialism and all sorts of stuff, and the level of research this cat does is astounding. Yeah, it's a good show. It is. It's a great show.

So I was on that, but that's maybe a good primer, but really, any Behind the Bastards would be a great place to start. Yeah, that show was a, I don't want to say surprising success, because Robert's awesome, but I think everyone was just like, wow, look at this thing. Look at him go. And we've got another new show, actually, from our pals at Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Joe and Robert. Yes.

They just launched a show called Invention. Yeah. I don't remember if they went with the exclamation point or not, but it's just awesome because I think no, but that, boy, their album art is so cool. It's really great. It's just a cool maze where you're just waiting for a minotaur to leap out. Yeah. And for the people that are like album art, what are you talking about?

Did they record an LP? Little industry lingo, everybody, the little icons that you see on your podcast players. It's called album art in the industry for some reason. Yeah. I still haven't figured that one out. I think it's just a holdover from iTunes days. I guess, but like what would be funny if they called it like the kasingel art. That would be pretty funny, actually.

They'll never bought a kasingel in my life. Oh, I have. Yeah. I don't remember what they were, but I have. So anyway, go check out Invention. You're going to love it. If you're a stuff to blow your mind fan, it's Joe and Robert doing their thing, but on different topics, yours is going to love it.

And then if you're not a stuff to blow your mind fan, well, you're welcome for introducing you to two awesome podcasts at once. Yeah. Those guys are great. Yeah. So, okay, let's talk about our own thing, okay? Let's do our own stuff. Yeah.

What about us? So we're talking, let's get in the way back machine and we need to put on our high temperature protective suits that we use to hang out on volcanoes sometimes. Well, and also our low temperature protective suits are in the back. They are. We don't need them for this one. Well, what day are we going to? We're going to June 30th, 1908.

Oh, okay. The temperature is probably about 70 degrees. Actually early in the morning, we're going to get there around 7 a.m. to give ourselves some time to get set up, but 7 a.m. on June 30th, 1908, in the Russian wilderness around the Podkomanya Tunguska, which means the Stony Tunguska River, it was probably about 50 degrees, we'll say, okay? Yeah. I mean, that is like choice summertime weather for the Siberian Plateau.

Yeah. And this place is gorgeous. So the Stony Tunguska River is a nice, wide, meandering, slow river and it's named Stony because the bottom is all beautiful pebbles and it just kind of, its banks are not really well-defined. It just kind of goes into the land and swamp land and then suddenly the land rises upward into ridges with huge, tall evergreens everywhere, it's just gorgeous. I love it here.

You know what we call those rocks in the south? Skipping rocks. Oh, they are skipping rocks. They call them that in Russia, too. Oh, really? Yeah. Skippinski rocks. Emily, the other day was like, I wish I could skip rocks and I was like, dude, you just

got to get the right rocks. That's really the key. I mean, you're sure there's techniques in the wrist and everything, but it really is the rock. Although there are people who can skip just about any rock you can hand them. Well, I'm a pretty good skipper, but you still need those good little smooth little river rocks. It's true.

It makes it way easier for sure. So in this beautiful place, I also failed to mention there's lots of reindeer wandering around and they're not wild. They're actually being herded by the Ivenki people, also known as the Tungus, who are basically nomadic reindeer herders that live in the area. Yeah. These are working deer. Right.

So everything's pretty idyllic and sweet and nice. It's the Siberian summer. And then all of a sudden there's a streak of cloud across the sky, a fireball at the tip. It looks like about a spear. And then all of a sudden this is 7.17 AM local time. All of a sudden that fireball disappears and then a huge flash of light explodes in the sky. And that's followed very quickly by a huge burst of heat.

And then after that is followed by a huge shock wave. And a massive explosion has just taken place, the likes of which have never been seen in recorded human history. Yeah. Where are we? Are we dead now? No. We're in our protective bubble.

Since we're actually visiting from another time, we're still in this time where we're just kind of visiting as in like a movie. I had never really quite wrapped my head around the physics of it, but we're safe. Okay. Good. We're not dead. Now, if Jerry killed us while we were paying attention to the Tunguska blast, in this life we would be dead.

Yeah. When you talk about explosions, this was, depending on where you look, it was something in the order of 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. I did the math. It was about 200 to 2,000 times more powerful. Yeah, man. That's the thing when you're talking about explosions in 1908. Sure.

It's going to be a range. But the thing is the Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNT yield. Yeah. It was a big explosion, so much so, and we'll get to more details, but supposedly you could see the light from this thing as far away as London. Yeah. There was a lot of worldwide effects that happened from it. Yeah.

So, the Hiroshima one was 15 kilotons. This is an estimated three to 30 megatons, million tons of TNT, just an astoundingly greater explosive force, and it just happened out of the blue, literally out of the clear blue sky on this day on June 30th, 1908. Yep. That's right. And thankfully, it's not a very populated area, but there are people there, and there are native tribes people that make their way there, and they live in huts, and they raise

those reindeer. And while there weren't a lot of people there, it created... It was an awful thing if you lived in the area. Some people died of shock and heart attacks, reindeer died, huts were leveled. It really wiped out the way of life for these people. Yeah. Yeah. Big time, because if you live in Siberia, you're spending your summer preparing for the winter,

and this blast just leveled their supplies, the reindeer that they depend on, it had a huge impact on them. Some people did die, although I think no one died directly being blown to bits by the blast. It was like elderly people had heart attacks and things like that. Yeah, and it ended up... It was a very interesting pattern that emerged here. So these trees were flattened out in a radial pattern that pointed away from the center of this explosion over an area. This was about close to 775 square miles, which is a huge, huge explosion.

There were trees that remained standing, and this is really interesting, but there were no branches, no leaves, no needles or anything. They were just basically the stem and the trunk of the trees bare standing straight up. Yeah, and those trees were right in the middle of the blast, the radial blast pattern. Yeah, and the fact that they were basically just stripped bare means that it was a very huge but super fast impact that blasted all those branches off without affecting the tree itself.

Yeah, so this blast, this explosion, this very hot, fast explosion, actually lit the trees on fire from the temperature that formed the leading edge of the explosion, and then the shockwave that followed that moved the air actually put the fire out. So they were flash-chart and then immediately extinguished. Yeah, there's one quote here from, I mean, because this is 1908, there's not a lot of direct accounts, but they do have a few, and we'll talk about how in a minute, but this is one, a hot wind blew past us. The ground and all the huts trembled causing the sod packing to fall from the ceilings.

The glass was blasted out of the window frames. Scary moment. Yeah, no, I can't even imagine, supposedly the Evenki people believe that they're God Ogde, who is I think the God of either lightning or fire or thunder, one of those, I've seen different accounts of it. They assumed, so imagine this, you're the only people, the only people are you, some reindeer herding tribes people who live in the area, and this happens, and you have no scientific frame of reference for it, and you believe your God came to punish you, wipe

out all of your stores and all of your reindeer and everything, and then that's just what you had to live with, because you were in such a remote area, no one knew about this. No one knew that this happened for a very long time, actually. Like I think some of the local papers began to report it by the end of the summer, but the larger world had no real idea what had happened, even though there were effects worldwide, but no one traced it back to this moment in Siberia for decades, at least a full decade, I think actually too. Yeah, and it wasn't like the scientific community just descended upon this place ever, really.

And we'll talk about some of the superstars, particularly this one man that went and investigated, but I mean, that's one of the reasons that we still don't know exactly what happened. We have a pretty good idea, which we'll save for later, but this was a singular event, it's not the kind of thing that we could say, well, this is like that other thing that happened. Right, exactly, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's nothing like, although they think that there was at least one other thing that happened like it in the 20th century, actually now two things have happened that are similar

to it. So we're kind of dancing around it a little bit, but let me tell you, let me point out one thing that has happened, even though this is considered far and away the largest cosmic, I guess, explosion that we have ever recorded, there was something else that happened in Brazil in 1930 near the Carusa, I think I'm saying that right, river, where there was a very similar event, huge explosion in the sky, scared the Bejesus out of the indigenous tribes living there, burned a significant portion of the Amazon for a full month. And there was a Jesuit missionary who came along five days after and got a lot of firsthand

accounts from that one, but they think it was similar, but much smaller than Tunguska. Yeah, and the mystery of this whole thing has led to some weird theories that we'll hit on later that are, I mean, some of them are, of course, just like aliens and beasts and things like that, which is, we obviously know that's not the case, but it still remains somewhat of a mystery after, you know, a hundred plus years. Right. And then so there's one other that this wasn't in recorded history as far as we consider recorded history typically, but there's evidence that this happened one other time.

And then this time, people weren't so lucky at something like about 3,500 years ago around the Dead Sea, there was a large area, I think about 500 square kilometers wide, which is a pretty significant amount of land that was just wiped bare of life, including humans living in the area at the time, and that it was an explosion from the sky. And it wiped out one village in particular called Tal El Hamam. And get this, Chuck, you know what Tal El Hamam was also called at this time 3,500 years ago? No.

Sodom. Oh, interesting. So they think that this is where the legend of Sodom being wiped out comes from, that it was actually an explosion, much like Tunguska. And they found shards of pottery from the time that the outsides have been turned to glass. Some of the particles inside have been gasified. And for this to have happened without doing anything more to the pottery means that it happened in an instant and that the air temperature was suddenly about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Amazing. And the other thing that happened too, and this I think also kind of bolstered the Sodom legend, was that a lot of the Dead Sea salts were pushed across the land over this huge amount of land and took what was once fertile and turned it into dead, sterile land. Because it was salted and it took something like 600 years for the area to recover from that. Wow. Isn't that fascinating?

It sure is. Let's take a break, because I think you can tell I'm getting a little worked up here. Indeed. All right. Well, we'll be right back, everybody, with more amazingness. Hey, everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn?

So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so from the outset, some scientific-minded types were like, well, I'm hearing reports

of this weird event that happened in 1908 in Tunguska, the Tunguska area. And it sounds to me a lot like a meteorite. So I'm going to go check out the whole thing and try to find this meteorite. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the early theories. There were seismographs that did register some activity. So some people thought it was an earthquake at first. It lit up the sky and created this massive dust plume. So that's where people in London and Germany, they said that they could read newspapers

at midnight, even that far away. So it was causing a little bit of commotion in the scientific community. And still, consider this was 1908, it's hard for a word to get around. So you can hardly blame people if this event happened kind of in the middle of nowhere in 1908, and it didn't exactly shake the world. But there was one man, and this was later on, his name was Leonid Kulik. And he was a scientist. He had a pretty interesting life and career.

He was born in 1883 in Estonia, which was later part of the Soviet Union. He studied math and he studied science. He fought in both World War I and World War II, which is really interesting because I'm curious about the number of people who were unfortunate enough to experience both those wars. Yeah, there were probably a lot. Not a ton. I mean, if you do the math, like you would have had to been pretty young and then pretty

old. I gotcha. For a soldier. You have fought in both of these. But in 1921, he had the task of examining meteorites within the Soviet Union. And that's where I got the impression that the first sort of scientific fire was lit under his butt to get into studying meteorites. Yeah.

Well, no, he was already studying meteorites and he heard some, he read some of those local press clippings that had been written like 10 or 12 years before. And he kind of put peace together like, oh, this sounds a lot like a meteorite impact. My job is already to go find meteorites because when they strike the ground, they have all this rich mineral ore with them. So I'm going to go find it and the government can come mine it and that's my job. So he, if Leonid Kulak had not bred some of these accounts and then traveled to the area, we would probably not have anywhere near the kind of understanding or awareness of the

impact that we have today. Yeah. So was that succinct enough for you? Yes, I think so. Okay, good. So like I was saying, in 1921, he was given the task of studying meteorites in the Soviet Union and so by the time 1927 rolls around, he's got a pretty good knowledge bed that he's sleeping on every night.

So he makes his first, he makes eventually three trips here to try and study things. The first one, unfortunately, he didn't even find the site because there was poor mapping going on, he was really sort of charting new territory, exploring this area and was just getting help from anyone he could. A lot of people were scared to go there because of, you know, they thought it was a judgment from the gods. Yeah, Ogde. Yeah.

So it was slow going. So that first expedition in 1927 was basically to just say, hey, I think I know where this actually happened. Like that's how rudimentary things were back then. Yeah, he, I think, so was it the first expedition in 1927 he didn't make it in? Did he also make it the same year or was it a different year? Did he also make it back there the same year? Yeah.

Well, I saw that he went in 27, 28, and 29. Okay, so whatever time he made it in there, he made it in there at least once, the first time, and he knew like pretty much right off the bat that he had found the site because all around there were trees that were laying on their sides, but they were all pointing in the same direction, which you just don't see very often. Yeah, for sure. And then that, you know, those at the center of those trees standing straight up with nothing there was another pretty good indication.

Yeah. The thing about Leonid Kulik is that he was very, very frustrated, like again, he was a meteor hunter, like this is his thing. So he fully expected to find an impact crater and hopefully the meteorite that had all sorts of iron or whatever, or a bore for him to go back and tell everybody about, but he couldn't. He could not find this. He did find those trees standing upright at the center that indicated that the reason they weren't blown over was because the force had blown directly down on top of them.

So he knew he'd found the center, but there was no sign of an impact crater. And he suspected that there was a swamp in the south, just south of the place where the trees still stood, that was hiding the impact crater and the meteorite itself. And I think that's kind of like what he went to his grave believing that he just could never find it because the swamp had basically swallowed it up. Yeah, which, you know, you can't blame the guy in the 1920s. It was a pretty decent idea because he, and again, he had no idea that, well, should we go ahead and say what people think happened?

Oh, okay. All right. Let's do it. Yeah. He had no idea that a meteor could explode pre-impact, which is basically what most people think happened now. Yes. Yeah.

He died in a Nazi, sorry, a Nazi prison camp in World War II. So he would not have been, had the benefit of that knowledge that came later on. I think starting in the 50s, they started to really suspect that. But at the time, when he came back and said, this is definitely, like, look at these pictures. An explosion, unlike the kind that we are even remotely capable of creating here on earth, so therefore a natural explosion, took place here. I have photographic evidence here. I've interviewed locals who were there.

So firsthand accounts of the experience. I've documented all this stuff, and I cannot find the meteorite or the impact crater. There's this sum total of all the info that I can provide. And some people took that and pieced it together to mean that, well, maybe it was a comet impact then, because comets are largely icy. They're rocky, and they have minerals and stuff as well. But they're not like an asteroid or a meteoroid, where they're made mostly of rock or metal. They're made mostly of ice.

So when it does explode, it would just kind of evaporate, and it might have the same kind of impact, but it would also not leave a crater or any real remnants of itself behind. So for a very long time, and among some quarters, that still explains the Tunguska event, that it was a comet impact rather than a meteor. It's like that riddle. Yeah. The one where the guy's hanging and there's a puddle of water. Yeah.

I love that one. Q-Look was like, there's a big puddle of water here. Actually, he thought the swamp swallowed it, but that didn't explain it. And Q-Look, I will say, although, I feel bad for the guy that he died, well, obviously he died in prison camp. That's the worst thing, but that he died not really getting to the bottom of this, but he kind of kept that drumbeat going for people to study this, took those great photographs, interviewed locals, and really did a lot of the groundwork for other people later to

build on. Yeah. Like if he hadn't taken this expedition on himself and really gone in and pieced together the first bits of evidence we had, fairly shortly, I mean what, like this is 1927 and the thing happened in 1908. So within 20 years, he really went and documented it, had it not been for his work, we would probably not have like any kind of anything like the understanding that we have today. And who knows, it might have been lost to history as well, too.

Maybe although I doubt it because like you can still see evidence of this today, which is pretty amazing. It is for sure. Like the fact that you can still find trees laying on their sides, right, or laying, yeah, on the ground. Yeah, I mean like the forest is growing up around it, but that stuff is still there sometimes, you know, in some places. I would love to see that.

Think in person? Yeah, of course in person. And just, I would definitely go in the summer. But so for those two weeks between late June and mid July, right before winter sets in and late July. And I should also say yes, I just saw it in the way back machine, but you know what I mean. And this was like, it's still not a populated area, so it's not like things have built up

around it. It's still largely the same as it was back in 1908. Yeah, there's a little, little, little town called Vanavara. And at the time it was basically a trading post and it's not much bigger now. It's really small. They have an airport, which is basically a strip of concrete that has been cleared. And you can get in and out of it, but it's not an easy place to get to. It requires helicopters, horseback, some people ride reindeer in on some of it, a lot of hiking.

There's a lot of bears. There's a lot of wolves. But the blast site, the epicenter is preserved in a nature preserve in Siberia. So you could conceivably go study it and people do. I think the most recent expedition was in 2013 and they're still trying to get to the bottom of it. Yeah. And Culek, I mean, he took every available mode of transportation he could to get there

over, I mean, it took him days and days and days over these expeditions to reach it. And he was a brave dude and like very determined. So Culek found a couple of other things. He found that the ground around the epicenter was actually scrunched up like a rug gets from the blast, which must have been astounding to see on like a massive scale. But he also saw that there were holes, really like strange circular holes that were just a few yards deep, but up to 50 or 100 feet in diameter. And he had no idea what he was looking at.

He knew that it must have something to do with the explosion, but it's just peculiar. He hadn't seen those before. There was nothing in the literature to explain what he was looking at. And so some of the stuff that he documented, it was great documentation and he was a very brave person for going and undertaking this expedition. But he also laid the groundwork for basically everybody with a theory to come along and suggest that their theory was what explains the Tunguska event. And like you kind of referred to earlier, some of them are kind of out there.

So let's take a little bit of break and we're going to come back and get into some explanations for the Tunguska event. Including the real one. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home, now the extra income helps pay her mortgage.

So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Charles, you've heard of this before, right? Yeah. So like, did you grow up with this?

Was this one of the things you were just aware of as a kid? No, it's, you know, something that became aware of with the internet. I think I heard about it from my Time Life Unsolved Mysteries books. Oh, sure. Which, just God bless those things. This is the set of those books, the Uncle John's Bathroom Readers and a David Letterman top 10 list from the 90s book. Probably are the three things that shape my brain more than anything else.

Yeah. Yeah. It says a lot. It's mad magazine too. You gotta throw it mad. Oh yeah, I can't forget mad. Sorry, thank you for saving me on that. So here's some of the theories that have kind of come and gone over the years.

As we said, the key looks was that it was, this meteor was swallowed up by the swamp south of the impact zone. Other people suggested that it was Lake Chico in Italy and that they were just off by their mapping skills were poor. And so this was the actual impact crater and it is now a lake, but now we think that they just didn't draw maps well back then because that wasn't on previous maps and everyone's like, but now it's here. So that's what it is.

Right, right. Yeah. But like you were saying, I think it was just so remote and people weren't drawing maps of it that it just hadn't been bothered to be put on. Exactly, which I totally believe. I think the comment, I mean, are there people that still believe it was a comet? Yeah, there are. Really?

Yeah. Well, let me explain why. There have been surveys of the site that are looking for traces of things that would be telltale signs that it was definitely a meteor. Like there are different kinds of meteors, but most meteors are either really stony, rocky. It's basically like a chunk of earth or it's like super metallic. It's basically like a big ball of metal or whatever.

And there's like different, it's a spectrum, right? There's like, it can fall anywhere in between those totally rocky and totally metallic. But the stuff aboard are going to be basically the same things. It's just the concentration of them. But one thing that you would find on like a meteorite is something like iridium or osmium. There are things you would find in earth, but you have to go to the center of the earth to find them. They're not on the surface.

And if you find those things on the surface of earth, it strongly suggests that a meteorite impacted earth. Well, they've found not much osmium or iridium around the Tunguska site. So they think that actually is kind of a thing that it suggests that maybe actually it was a comet because a comet would have those things, but just not in high concentration because it would mostly be a big ball of ice. Right. And it's kind of kept the comet thing alive as recently as just the last few years.

Yeah. Well, they did surveys in the 50s and they did find space dust is probably the best way to say it. They did. It's true. Yeah. So they found, you know, what was extraterrestrial rock dust? They found it in the area.

They found it in the soil and it does match the date of the event. So that to me means that the leading theory is probably correct, which is that a meteor exploded about three miles above land, which basically just blew it to dust. And that's why there aren't huge, huge chunks of rock laying everywhere. Yeah. So that's the predominant theory right now is that it was a meteor that blew up, like you said, I think something like a half a dozen miles over, over the surface of the earth in the atmosphere.

And it blew up so with such force that not only did it, it, you know, cause the ground to buckle and bend and turn into like a rug and blow 80 million trees down over a couple hundred square miles. It also just blew itself and every any evidence of itself just into smithereens into dust. And so that dust layer is the only remnants of it left. But the problem is, is they didn't know how that could happen. Like that's, if you put all the evidence together, that's the picture it painted. But at the time, and until very recently, science was like, we don't know how something

like that would happen. It seems like that is what happened, but how would that even happen? Yeah. And it explains the, the fireball in the sky, because that's what you would expect to see when a meteor is trucking toward the earth. This thing was about 120 feet or larger in diameter was going about 33,000 miles an hour. And it was hot, like super, super hot because of friction. Right.

So the thing, this, this huge rock, and they got all those numbers just basically reverse engineering the force of the explosion, right? So that rock that's traveling so fast, what'd you say, like 34,000 miles an hour or something like that? I said 33, but give or take a thousand miles. All right. Who cares at that point, right? When it hits the atmosphere, it's suddenly met with that friction and gravity and drag

and everything, and that these forces acting on it all of a sudden just destabilize it. And that the pressure that's building up at the front of this huge rock is different by so much to the pressure behind it, that the differential just destabilizes this rock. And because it's traveling so fast and has so much energy and there's so much heat associated with it, it doesn't just break up, it blows up. Yeah. What I'm surprised about it is that this hasn't happened more, and it must just be a very specific combination of size and speed and heat.

But I'm surprised that that doesn't happen more, that combination. Well, some people are worried that it could happen more. Like one of the predictions I saw is that a Tunguska-like event, we could expect it to happen over Earth maybe once every 100 to 300 years. Yeah, but we haven't seen that. That hasn't played out, right? No, but somebody who wrote an article I read pointed out like there's not some schedule that rocks follow when they're coming into Earth's atmosphere.

That's just not how things work. So we hope it's like that, but it's probably much less predictable than that. And we actually did a survey called Project Space Guard, I think, where we surveyed all of the near Earth rocks, the big ones. And we found that none of the big ones are probably going to come near us anytime soon. But we found also that we had trouble seeing the small ones, and the small ones could still create like a Tunguska event. Which, I mean, like you said, it happened over a pretty depopulated area, and it still

affected humans. If it happened over like a city, a major city, it would be just lights out for that entire city. So the chances are pretty low that it would happen over a populated area just by virtue of the fact that we tend to populate in dense clusters while leaving also huge portions of the Earth, especially the oceans, unpopulated. But if it did happen over a populated area, it would be really, really bad. Yeah.

I mean, they make movies about like fictional movies about that stuff. Right. Exactly. So hopefully it doesn't happen, but it could is the point. Yes. And I always wonder like, man, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened over like a big city. But like you said, we always think like others just people everywhere, but that's not the case.

Oh, well, like how our settlements are? Yeah. Like when you think about how large the Earth is compared to where the people are, we're not everywhere. Water is everywhere. Right. No, it's true. So there, I think in 2013, Chuck, there was the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Do you remember that? Over Russia? I don't remember that. There was a, like it was very well documented because everybody has a video tape camera on their cell phone these days. And there was a meteor that basically did the same thing in Tunguska, except it was far, far smaller. It was something like 2000 times more powerful than Hiroshima.

No, that doesn't sound right. 30 times more powerful. I'm sorry. Tunguska was up to 2000 times more powerful, but it like blew the windows out of places. It knocked people down and it really caught people's attention saying like, Hey, everybody, this is a real thing that like this can happen. And if a huge one happens over a population center, then we will be in trouble. So I think it kind of caught the attention of the scientific community that like this

is something we need to keep an eye on literally. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Hopefully we will. I'm glad it's not up to me. You got anything else? I got nothing else.

All right. Well, if you want to know more about the Tunguska event, type that word in the search bar of your favorite search engine and it will bring up all sorts of interesting stuff. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this letter from a teacher. We love these. Hey guys, I'm writing to thank you for helping me teach my AP psychology course. I have a degree in history and had taught just United States history and world history

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