'So what did whack us?'
Novosibirsk - Sept 2, 2002
A geologist from Novosibirsk has set up a new hypothesis of the explosion in Podkamennaya Tunguska, which took place on June 30, 1908. It was not a meteorite that caused such extensive destructions and conflagration, but a fluid jet, which had shot up under high pressure from the interior of the Earth. The event which occurred almost a hundred years ago in Podkamennaya Tunguska has drawn scientists' attention again.
What actually exploded at that time in the remote taiga, the power of explosion being equal to the 50-megaton H-bomb?
The hypothesis that it was a meteorite or any other extraterrestrial object has not quite satisfied inquisitive minds, since too many puzzles remain unsolved. A geologist Vladimir Epifanov, Siberian Research Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineral, reported to the recent Conference "Degasification of the Earthe" (Moscow) that the reason for the explosion could have been a powerful fluid jet suddenly shot up from the depth of the planet.
Extensive carbohydrates accumulations exist in the area where the alleged 'Tunguska meteorite' fell down. Two abyssal breaks in this area split the sedimentary rock containing the gas-and-oil fields and gas-condensate fields sealed up by basalts on top, the basalts streamed from multiple fissures and volcanoes 200 million years ago. The epicentre of the explosion is located just above one of the ancient craters. The scientist assumes that the gases associated with the oil deposits, and methane produced in the depths of coal beds were accumulated under a thick cover of basalts and then they broke free one day. It seems that a moderate earthquake could have promoted the process.
The gas kick started nine days prior to the major explosion, a narrow jet of gases rushed up southbound. The fluid jet from under the earth was accompanied by dust, and the wind carried the dust to the west. In the upper layers of atmosphere a layer of aerosols was formed. This layer charged with electricity could have produced the fatal 'sparkle'. It put on fire the top of the liquid jet, and the fire ball rushed towards the Earth. In the oxygen saturated layer of atmosphere the fire ball exploded, the blast wave stirred up the ground, and the gas discharge ceased.
The conflagration was in full swing in the area of explosion, however the trees in the epicentre remained alive. An ice dome was probably formed around the place where from the gas discharged, similar to that as it gets formed in a refrigerator when the gas goes through a narrow opening and then gets into a large chamber. It is interesting to note that the local carbohydrates are rich in helium, which could have ensured the H-bomb effect.
Vladimir Epifanov is perplexed by some circumstances of the Tunguska catastrophe, the extraterrestrial hypothesis being unable to account for them. For instance, not all the trees in the epicentre got burned. Judging by the strength of the blast wave, radiation burn, pine-tree mutations and other parameters, the event resembles the H-bomb explosion, except for high radiation.
The motion path of the exploded body is such that it could hardly be a spaceship or a meteorite, the substance of which has never been found in the soil. All these facts have made the scientist think about an earthly nature of the explosion, particularly because such conjectures were made more than once by researchers in different years. Thus, in the middle of the 80s A.A. Rastegin, geologist from Novosibirsk, pointed out that the epicentre of the explosion was indeed located above a major gas accumulation.
~******~
SOURCE: AFP and El Universal Online
DATE: Friday, July 25, 2003
Did a Giant Meteor Destroy 100 Square Kilometers of Taiga?
The collision of a giant meteor in Siberia's Irkutsk region in September 2002 destroyed some 100 square kilometers of taiga with an explosion whose power was equal to that of a medium-sized atom bomb, according to the head of a scientific expedition.
The expedition--consisting of ten scientists and physicians--had to wait unti May to locate the epicenter of the devastated area, which is in a semi-mountainous and forested area near Bodaibo, to the northeast of Irkutsk and Lake Baikal, according to Vadim Tchernobrov, the expedition's leader, during a press conference.
"Trees have fallen in a way that occurs specifically in cases involving very powerful expansive waves over a surface of some one hundred square kilometers," he explained.
"To give you an idea, the explosion of the meteorite, which desintegrated before it hit the surface and whose fragments have only caused some 20 craters measuring up to twenty emters across, has a power equal to that of a medium-sized nuclear warhead."
During the press conference, scientists displayed images recorded during the expedition, which show trees cut in half and in some cases burned, since very high temperatures were recorded during the explosion.
============================================
Translation (C) 2003. Scott Corrales, Institute of Hispanic Ufology. Special thanks to Gloria Coluchi.
Visit the INEXPLICATA website at:
Also see:
TUNGUSKA - Natural Disaster or Earth Encounter With Alien Craft?
Mysteries of Siberia's "Valley of Death" Parts 1, 2, and 3
The Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma
Tim Radford
Thursday February 24, 2005
The Tunguska event has been a hit ever since June 30, 1908. On that morning something very bright, very hot and very hard exploded over the central Siberian plateau, to flatten more than 2,000 sq km of taiga and raise a cloud of dust 80 km high. Researchers later calculated that whatever did it must have exploded about 8km above the wilderness with the force of 1,000 Hiroshimas. Seismologists in St Petersburg, 4,000km away, picked up the shock.
A century on, no one is sure what happened. The betting is on an asteroid impact: not so small as to burn up entirely in the upper atmosphere, not so huge as to hit the ground and leave a big hole. Something stony 30 metres across, moving about 54,000km an hour would do the trick. This scenario has support from those planetary scientists and astronomers who see Earth-crossing asteroids as a potential hazard for humanity. But it could have been a comet, or a collision with a black hole millionths of a metre across but with a mass of about 100,000bn tonnes, or even a pulse of pure energy delivered by the sudden arrival of a lump of antimatter, randomly lobbed across space. Others have proposed a lump of ball lightning, a gas explosion underground, a laser strike from a distant star system, an alien spacecraft, a plasmoid ejected from the sun, or even an early death ray experiment that went wrong.
This book is part scientific detective story, part planetary science text and part physics lesson by subterfuge. Surendra Verma waltzes the reader through the process of scientific debate, introduces big themes such as the death of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, mass extinctions, magnetic reversals, nuclear winter, the extraterrestrial debate, the Drake equation, death stars and - yes - the world of flying saucers and the X-files. The unwary reader could learn a lot: anything, in fact, except what caused the Tunguska event.
· To buy The Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma (pub. Icon, £12.99) for £12.34 inc p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
Also see:
Tunguska event an actual UFO crash site
22.09.2006
In recent history, the famous Tunguska event stands out as one of the rare large-scale demonstrations that a full doomsday event is a real possibility for the human race.
Back during the Soviet Union times a science-fiction writer Aleksandr Kazantsev suggested that the event was a result of a UFO explosion rather than a meteorite crash. However, the Soviet scientists rejected the theory and prohibited the author from continuing any further research in that area, Ufolog reports.
Since 1994 the theory has been revived after the Tunguska Spatial Phenomenon Foundation in Krasnoyarsk, made up of some 15 enthusiasts, among them geologists, chemists, physicists and mineralogists have been organising regular expeditions to the area.
Wikipedia informs that the Tunguska event was an explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Evenk Autonomous Okrug, in the early morning hours of June 30, 1908.
The energy of the blast, which was assumed to have been caused a meteorite or a comet, was later estimated to be between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, which would be equivalent to Castle Bravo, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated by the U.S.
The blast felled an estimated 60 million trees causing damage 400 miles away, and was heard even further. Even the heat that came out from the explosion was felt hundreds of miles away. For several nights all over northern Europe, the sky glowed enough to light the street of London.
The 1927 investigation expedition could not locate any bits of meteorite which puzzled the researchers looking for evidence. Another puzzle for the expedition was the way the tress were felled in an outward motion and that in the center trees were still standing, although all their bark and branches have been destroyed.
Fascination with the Siberian mystery has not diminished since, and many scientists to this day are struggling to figure out the real cause of the destruction.
Still only Kazantsev's unusual theory is capable of shedding some light on the multitude of questions about the Tunguska event. Perhaps the famous meteorite's site really was a site of a spaceship crash?
UFO Evidence reports that after the Second World War and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, photos of the cities were compared with aerial photos of the Tunguska blast, and they were stunningly similar. Many of the witnesses to the original crash spoke of seeing and oval-shaped mass moving across the sky, as well as seeing the object change course, and of having a very low speed.
The nuclear-powered UFO hypothesis was adopted by TV drama critics Thomas Atkins and John Baxter in their book The Fire Came By. The 1998 television series The Secret KGB UFO Files referred to the Tunguska event as "the Russian Roswell" and claimed that crashed UFO debris had been recovered from the site.
Natalia Vysotskaya
