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"The Sky Has Split Apart!"
The Cosmic Mystery of the Century
by Professor Roy A. Gallant
Southworth Planetarium
University of Southern Maine

The explosions were heard in the early morning hours of June 30, 1908.
It was a drama that has occurred countless times in Earth's history,
and that is sure to play again.

Those Tungus tribesmen and Russian fur traders who happened to glance
into the southeastern Siberian sky that fateful morning must have been
startled to see a fireball streaking through the atmosphere toward
their trading post of Vanavara and leaving a trail of light some 800
kilometers long. The object, whatever its nature, was approaching from
an azimuth of 115 degrees and descending at an entry angle of 30 to 35
degrees above the horizon. Their gaze followed the bright fireball as
it continued along a northwestward trajectory until it seemed about to
disappear over the horizon. Then it shattered in a rapid series of
cataclysmic explosions lasting about half a second over a distance of
15 to 20 kilometers.

The site was centered on 101 E by 62 N near the Stony Tunguska River
92 kilometers north of Vanavara. According to calculations, the object
shattered at an altitude of 7.6 kilometers2 and became the first such
cosmic visitor to strike Earth in the life time of civilized man.

According to an eyewitness in Vanavara:

"The sky split apart and a great fire appeared. It became so hot that
one couldn't stand it. There was a deafening explosion [and my friend]
S. Semenov was blown over the ground across a distance of three
sazhens [six meters]. As the hot wind passed by, the ground and the
huts trembled. Sod was shaken loose from our ceilings and glass was
splintered out of the window frames."

What was this cosmic visitor?

Some have suggested it was a black hole. Others have wondered if it
was a piece of anti-matter. A Japanese UFO group (Sakura), headed by
Kozo Kowai, are convinced that it was the explosion of the nuclear
power plant of an errant vehicle belonging to extraterrestrials. A
number of science-fiction accounts have degraded the event to fantasy.
Some critics hold that the entire history of nearly five decades of
field work represents little more than a chain of mistakes. Most
scientists disagree and point to a comet or an asteroid being the
cosmic culprit.

What has been learned since the first organized investigation in 1927?
And what is the current thinking?

To this day the vast Tunguska region remains a desolate area of
mosquito-infested bogs and swamps amid the beautiful hilly taiga. To
reach the epicenter you are dropped off by helicopter. Or you hike in.

For a trained eye, evidence of the blast is not difficult to identify,
even after 90 years. The power of the blast felled trees outward in a
radial pattern over an area of 2,1504 square kilometers, more than
half the size of Rhode Island. In the hot central region of the
epicenter the forest flashed into an ascending column of flame visible
several hundred kilometers away.

The fires burned for weeks, destroying an area of 1,000 square
kilometers. Ash and powdered tundra fragments sucked skyward by the
fiery vortex were caught up in the global air circulation and carried
around the world. Meanwhile, bursts of thunder echoed across the land
to a distance of some 800 kilometers.5

The mass of the object has been estimated at about 100,000 tons and
the force of the explosion at 40 megatons of TNT, 2,000 times the
force of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. (By
comparison, the explosive force of the Arizona asteroid that struck
some 50,000 years ago, has been estimated at 3.5 megatons.6)

Following the Tunguska explosion, unusually colorful sunsets and
sunrises caught the world's attention and were reported from many
countries, including Western Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, and Western
Siberia. The climax of visual displays occurred on the night of June
30th. Although they continued, they weakened exponentially over
several weeks until they died away.

The New York Times of July 3, 1908 reported "remarkable lights" being
"observed in the northern heavens on Tuesday and Wednesday nights."
Scientists mistakenly attributed the dazzling displays to solar
outbursts causing electrical disturbances in the atmosphere. Similar
light displays had been reported in 1883 at the time of the Krakatoa
volcanic explosion in the Sunda Strait, said the Times.

These "optical fireworks" and "light nights" were most prominent over
Eastern Siberia and Middle Asia. They included a night sky bright
enough to read a watch or newspaper by. Dust in the air at heights of
from 40 to 70 kilometers caused high-altitude noctiluscent, or
"night-shining," clouds that illuminated much of the visible sky. And
there were halos around the Sun. A marked decrease of the air's
transparency was recorded in the United States by the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory and California's Mount Wilson Observatory.

Disturbances in earth's magnetic field were reported 900 kilometers
southeast of the epicenter by the Irkutsk Observatory. These were
magnetic "storms" similar to the ones produced by nuclear test
explosions in the atmosphere. The seismograph station some 4,000
kilometers west in St. Petersburg recorded tremors produced by the
blast, as did more distant stations around the world.

But no one, except observers in Central Siberia, was aware that an
enormous explosion of a cosmic body had occurred. It was generally
believed that an earthquake, somewhere, had taken place. And little
more was thought about the matter in scientific circles.

...Except for a dedicated Russian scientist named Leonid Kulik, the
founder of meteorite science in Russia. But it wasn't until 19 years
after the event that Kulik managed to organize the first expedition in
search of the site, and cause of the event. There had been reports
from Tungus nomads of a vast area of fallen trees and evidence of much
burning. Kulik suspected that a large meteorite had fallen, and he was
determined to find it.

The shaman-chief of the Tungus people, or Evenks, had for years
virtually sealed off the region, proclaiming it "enchanted." The Evenk
people had long been fearful of further enraging the gods whose wrath
they believed had been responsible for 1908 explosion. Funded by the
then Soviet Academy of Sciences, Kulik and his group penetrated the
"enchanted" region in June. His party was to hack its way through some
100 kilometers of taiga, cross rivers and streams, and plod through
bogs and swamps. Perhaps worst of all, they had to endure endless and
dense swarms--"walls" is more descriptive--of mosquitoes.

We were lucky enough to be hiking across the epicenter region during
an unusually dry spell. The ground was firm enough for ordinary hiking
shoes rather than the traditional Wellington rubber boots. And the
mosquitoes were not in full force, although much of the time I found
it necessary to wear a head net and gloves. During my work in
Tunguska, I spent part of a day at the Churgim Creek site, most likely
camping at the very spot where Vasiliy Dzhenkoul's tepees of poles
overlain with thick sheets of Siberian cedar bark were located. It was
here that the 1908 explosion instantly incinerated his 600 to 700
reindeer. His hunting dogs, stores, furs, and tepees also were reduced
to ashes.9

Kulik found the epicenter and mapped the area of fallen trees. He then
puzzled over several neat oval areas which he presumed to be old
meteorite craters that had been filled in by time. He supposed that
the bulk of the meteorite lay embedded somewhere within the nearby
Great Southern Swamp in the central epicenter. But magnetic probes and
drilling over the years failed to detect a single gram of metal either
in the Great Southern Swamp or in those neat oval patches of tundra.
Subsequent searches for a meteoric body also have failed, right up
through our 1992 expedition.

What, then, was the Tunguska object?

World War II interrupted further expeditions. It wasn't until 1958
that expeditions headed by Kirill Florensky were resumed and carried
out by the Committee on Meteorites of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
In 1959 Tomsk University joined research efforts under the guidance of
Gennadiy Plekhanov. In 1963 the scientific investigations probing the
Tunguska event gained new vigor under the leadership of Nickolai
Vasiliev, of the (now) Russian Academy of Sciences, with whom I had
the privilege of working during part of this past summer. He has
coordinated the scientific research of the past 29 consecutive
expeditions over that many years.

It wasn't until 1989 that foreign scientists were invited to join
Russian investigators. For 10 years the Japanese had tried to gain
access to the Tunguska region, and in 1989 managed to do so, but only
through the personal involvement of Michael Gorbachev; and in 1992 I
became the first American to tread that "enchanted" land. My
associates were mostly Russians, although German, Japanese, and
English investigators also were part of our group of about 20.

We had been flown into the site from Vanavara by helicopter and left
there. My hope had been to backpack the 60 miles return to Vanavara,
following Kulik's trail. But I was advised to abandon the plan when we
learned that oil exploration crews many miles away had inadvertantly
caused a forced migration of bears and wolves into our area and all
along the Kulik trail. One of the German members of our group did
encounter one bear near our camp.

What has been learned about the Tunguska event over the past 34
expeditions? And why is it important that investigations continue?

There have been a series of interesting biological consequences of the
explosion. Following the blast there was accelerated growth of biomass
in the region of the epicenter, and the accelerated growth had
continued. There also was an increase in the rate of biological
mutations, not only within the epicenter but along the trajectory of
the object over Tunguska. For example, abnormalities in the Rh blood
factor of local Evenk groups have been found. Genetic variation in
certain local ant species is now being studied. And genetic
abnormalities in the seeds and needle clusters of at least one species
of pine have been discovered.10

Last year an Italian group of scientists led by M. Galli analyzed the
resin of trees felled by the explosion. Galli suspected that cosmic
matter embedded in the trees from the force of the blast might help
identify the Tunguska object. Preliminary findings indeed did identify
such cosmic matter--among which were particles of calcium,
iron-nickel, silicates, cobalt-wolfram, and lead.11 Since certain
asteroids contain such matter, Galli has breathed new life into the
old asteroid theory.

If it was an asteroid, where's the crater and large asteroid
fragments? It has been suggested that part of the asteroid might have
been pulverized on exploding while a portion remaining intact skipped
off in a new direction and back out of the atmosphere.

To complicate matters, investigators of the 1960s identified four
smaller epicenters within the larger one of a 60-kilometer diameter.
Each of the smaller epicenters has its own radial tree-fall pattern,
and each presumably was caused by individual explosions during the
half-second burst.

A number of scientists favor a comet theory. The leading investigator
in this area is the geochemist Yevgeniy Kolesnikov, of Moscow
University. Over the years he has dug out large blocks of peat samples
from various locations over the epicenter and analyzed them for
isotopic anomalies.12 The 1908 layer in his many peat samples contains
high concentrations of a number of volatiles that also occur in the
upper atmosphere and are presumed to be cometary dust.

Over the next several Tunguska expeditions we can expect emphasis on a
search for cosmic traces of the 1908 event. One of the difficulties of
isotopic anomalies research, however, is positively identifying the
presumed cosmic matter as truly cosmic and not terrestrial in origin.
For the present, Kolesnikov and Galli are the leading investigators in
this area.

At this stage of the Tunguska investigations the comet and asteroid
theories appear to be the most promising, but the matter is far from
being closed.

Why is it important to find the answer?

According to Academician Vasiliev, "Had such a cosmic body exploded
over Europe instead of the desolate region of Siberia, the number of
human victims would have been 500,000 or more, not to mention the
ensuing ecological catastrophe. Two years ago an asteroid of probably
several hundred yards diameter passed Earth at a distance of only
700,000 kilometers. On an astronomical scale that is very close. The
Tunguska episode marks the only event in the history of civilized man
when Earth has collided with a truly large celestial object, although
innumerable such collisions have occurred in the geological past. And
many more are bound to occur."13

Vasiliev stresses that is why continued investigations of the Tunguska
event are important--because it will happen again, sometime. Only by
knowing what the object was, and by knowing its devastating biological
consequences, will the scientific and medical communities be in a
position to deal with such a 40-megaton, or greater, cataclysm in the
future. It is not necessary to remind this group that there are 23
Apollo objects in orbit out there in our back yard. And there are
500,000 asteroids with adiameter in excess of 1 kilometer; and those
objects are continually colliding, fragmenting, and flying off into
erratic orbits.

Vasiliev and his colleagues have managed to save 4,000 square
kilometers of the Tunguska region as a national reserve for the next
20 years. "But we think this is not enough for scientific research,"
he says, "and that is why our initiative now is to protect the reserve
under the supervision of UNESCO, because this is not only a matter of
concern to Russia, but of the whole world."14

He also stresses the importance of American and other foreign
investigative teams with sophisticated technology joining the ongoing
Tunguska international expeditions. "We need your advanced technology
and your well-equipped laboratories, which we lack," he said.

"And to enhance our preparedness for such a catastrophe," Vasiliev
adds, "programs such as the American military program of Star Wars
could be used not as a means of nations mutually threatening each
other but as a united effort to survey the vicinity of space near our
planet to be on the lookout for new cosmic invaders."15

REFERENCES

1. Data in this paragraph are from participantants of the ongoing
Interdesciplinary Independent Expeditions of the Tomsk Branch of the
Russian Society of Astronomical-Geodedic Society. (IIE)
2. Ibid.
3. Quotation is from the archives of the IIE.
4. Data are from the IIE.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. From research conducted by Yuriy Kandyba, long-time member of the
IIE.
9. Information about Vasiliy Dzhenkoul is from the IIE.
10. Biological effects mentioned in this paragraph have been
researched by various members of the IIE over the past several
decades.
11. Andreev, G., and Vasilyev, N. "Report on the International
Tunguska Expeditions of 1990-91."
12. Kolesnikov, Yevgeniy, of Moscow State University. "Isotopic
Investigations in the Area of the Tunguska Catastrophe in the Year
1908." A paper presented at a conference entitled "Global Catastrophes
in Earth History,." Snowbird, Utah. 1988. (Numerous references of
related research are cited in Kolesnikov's paper.)
13. From an interview conducted by the author of this paper.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.

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