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Feature Articles 

The Tunguska explosion: an unexpected loud bang and explosion

/Few events were as catastrophic, and mysterious, as the Tunguska
explosion. The explosion occurred near the Tunguska River ? hence the
name ? at around 7.17 am on June 30, 1908. But that is about all that is
known about it!/

Philip Coppens

------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Tunguska explosion is notorious as being the largest impact event in
recent history. It felled an estimated 80 million trees as if they were
matchsticks, this over an area of 2,150 square kilometres (830 square
miles). Fortunately, the area was largely uninhabited, and the explosion
is believed to have only killed two people, though later reports argued
several people in the nearby villages suffered fatal burns. Despite the
minimal human loss it was responsible for, the explosion, which is
believed to have happened at an altitude between 5 and 10 kilometres in
the atmosphere, was apparently heard as far away as London, underlining
the magnitude of the event.

Despite the loud bang and explosion, what caused the explosion has been
the subject of decades of intense speculation. A century later, no
consensus has been reached. Tunguska has even been held responsible for
global warming, when Vladimir Shaidurov, of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, noted how it could have been responsible for changes in the
amount of ice crystals at high altitude, thus influencing the amount of
solar radiation reaching the earth's surface ? resulting in global warming.
The most favoured theory is that the explosion was caused by a meteoroid
or comet. Estimates for the size of this meteor have ranged from 30 to a
massive 1200 metres, though there is more unanimity on the energy of the
blast, estimated at 10-15 megatons, or 1000 times more powerful than the
atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II.
As the object exploded in mid air, however, no fragments of a meteor
have so far been recovered, nor an impact crater, despite several
candidates having been put forward ? each time, without success. And
without an impact crater ? which you would expect with meteors ? some
have speculated that what exploded above Tunguska was something for more
exotic, like an extra-terrestrial craft, while still others wondered
whether it might not even have been a black hole, or an experiment by
the famous inventor Nikola Tesla that had gone wrong.

What is known, is that at around 7.17 am, people in the hills northwest
of Lake Baikal observed 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 loud knocking sound ?similar to artillery fire? that went in
short bursts spaced increasingly wider apart. Closer to the site of the
explosion, a shock wave knocked people off their feet, while windows
were broken as far as hundreds of miles away.
Once back on their feet, some of these witnesses were so flabbergasted
that they believed the end of the world had begun, underlining the
extra-ordinary nature of the event; some reportedly even went to their
local authorities, asking what they were going to do about it! The mere
passage of time ? fortunately ? proved that the end of the world would
be for another day. However, as these things go, some have argued that
?if? the explosion was due to a meteorite, and ?if? it had occurred 4
hours 47 minutes later, ?then? it would have completely destroyed the
Russian capital of Saint Petersburg, then still ruled by the Russian
Emperor. ?If? this had indeed happened, ?then? the history of the 20th
century might have been totally different. Perhaps there would not have
been a Russian Revolution, nor a Cold War, perhaps not even World War I
and II ? instead, perhaps, a massive rescue operation that would unite
the nations of the world and a realisation that this could have happened
to any city anywhere on the world.
But back to what did happen. The explosion registered on seismic
stations across Eurasia, registering ? it is estimated, as the Richter
scale did not yet exist ? 5.0 on the Richter scale. Of course, ?if? the
explosion had occurred on the crust of the earth, rather than in the
sky, it would have registered much stronger than 5.0. Speaking of the
sky: during the weeks that followed the explosion, the night skies were
aglow so that people could read at night ? helped, of course, by the
fact that nights on the northern hemisphere were already short, so close
to the summer solstice.

/Decades on, some of the damage remained visible/

Though several books would be devoted to the event decades later, at the
time, little scientific interest was awoken by the loud bang and
explosion. Systematically writing down eyewitness reports only began in
1959, five decades after the incident, when interviews were conducted
with indigenous people who had been within 100 kilometres of the explosion.
The first recorded expedition arrived at the scene as late as 1921, when
the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, visiting the Podkamennaya
Tunguska River basin as part of a survey for the Soviet Academy of
Sciences, deduced from local accounts that the explosion had been caused
by a giant meteorite impact. He persuaded the Soviet government to fund
further expeditions to the Tunguska region, based on the prospect of
meteoric iron that could be salvaged to aid the Soviet industrial
machine. That second expedition would occur in 1927, but to their
surprise, no crater was found. ?Only? a region of scorched trees about
50 kilometres across was still in evidence ? this twenty years after the
explosion. Indeed, a century onwards, some of the fallen trees can still
be seen.
Kulik would organise three further expeditions, but each time, failed to
find an impact crater. Expeditions sent to the area in the 1950s and
1960s did find microscopic glass spheres in siftings of the soil.
Chemical analysis showed that the spheres contained high proportions of
nickel and iridium, which are found in high concentrations in meteorites
? so far the best evidence that it was indeed a meteorite that exploded
over Tunguska. In June 2007, scientists from the University of Bologna
argued that Lake Cheko was the potential site of the meteor?s impact.
However, as early as 1961, an investigation had dismissed a modern
origin of Lake Cheko. The Italian team nevertheless claims that the
"expeditions in the 1960s concluded the lake was not an impact crater,
but their technologies were limited."

Within the circle of academics interested in Tunguska, there is a
largely theoretical debate as to whether Tunguska was a meteorite, a
comet or an asteroid ? all three different types of astronomical bodies
that sometimes penetrate our atmosphere. The comet hypothesis is
supported by the glowing skies that were observed across Europe for
several evenings after the impact, possibly explained by dust and ice
that had been dispersed from the comet's tail across the upper
atmosphere. In 1978, Slovak astronomer Lubor Kresák suggested that the
explosion was caused by a fragment of the short-period Comet Encke,
which is responsible for the Beta Taurid meteor shower, which peaked
when the Tunguska explosion occurred.
However, in 1983, astronomer Zdenek Sekanina published a paper
criticizing the comet hypothesis. He argued that such a comet ought to
have disintegrated during entry into the atmosphere; he instead proposed
an asteroid was responsible. His hypothesis received a boost in 2001,
when Farinella, Foschini, et al. stated that the object had arrived from
the direction of the asteroid belt.

/Aerial photograph from 1938 showing the extent of the damage/

Whether meteorite, asteroid or comet, each hypothesis truly requires an
impact crater, and despite eight decades of searching for one, none has
been found, even though the epicentre of the explosion was identified by
Kulik in the 1950s, when he flew over the area and was able to find a
section in the centre of the devastation where trees had not been
felled, but had remained upright. An object that caused this explosion
is not necessarily gigantic, but would crash into the earth with such
force that it would leave a clear imprint on the surface of the Earth ?
and would destroy trees, rather than keep them upright.
To work around this problem, some have suggested that the object
disintegrated in mid-air, whereby the entire object was pulverised:
nothing hit the ground and all the residue remained in the atmosphere ?
hence the glowing skies, they say.
Others have suggested the solution is not in the sky, but in the ground.
Since the early 1990s, Andrei Ol'khovatov of the Soviet Radio Instrument
Industry Research Institute, noted that Tunguska was a poorly understood
strong coupling between subterranean and meteorological phenomena that
science is not yet ready to understand ? or has a name for. Wolfgang
Kundt, an astrophysicist from Bonn University, Germany, somewhat agrees
that part of the answer is to be found in the ground, arguing for a
massive gas explosion. He notes that a large natural gas deposit lies
below the site, a well-known fact unconnected to the event until he made
it part of his theory as to what happened at Tunguska. Kundt has
modelled a Tunguska ?outgassing? and says it would fit with eyewitness
accounts of the event.

Either way, Tunguska is unique within modern history, and hence some
unique suggestions have been put forward to explain it. There is the
usual suggestion of an exploding alien spaceship, but much more
imaginatively, one theory believed it was caused by a piece of
antimatter falling from space, followed by Albert A. Jackson and Michael
P. Ryan, both physicists at the University of Texas, who proposed in
1973 that the culprit was a small black hole passing through the Earth.
That theory is not only unique; it also comes with an innate problem,
for it requires the presence of a second explosion on the other side of
the planet, where the black hole would have exited our planet.
Furthermore ? and few seem to have underlined this ? it would require at
least one gaping hole, throughout the Earth, whereas we haven?t been
able to even find an impact crater.
One ?out there? theory is more inviting than others, and involves the
greatest genius of the 19th century, Nikola Tesla. Oliver Nichelson was
the first to argue that the explosion was the unfortunate result of an
experiment by Nikola Tesla. He notes that the explosion occurred when
Robert Peary was trying to reach the North Pole, and that Tesla was not
in the best state of mind. Tesla was at a moment in his life when his
ideas were far ahead of his time, and he began to realise that several
of these ideas would never be realised as the world was simply not ready
for them ? or did not want them. Some of these ideas, such as the
wireless transmission of electricity, were at least a century ahead of
their time ? noting that only recently, some scientists are
investigating the possibility (again).

/Nikola Tesla/

Psychologist Marc J. Seifer believes that Tesla suffered a nervous
breakdown in 1906, due to two men close to him dying, including Stanford
White, the architect who designed the Wardenclyffe Tower, a
telecommunications aerial tower intended for commercial wireless
trans-Atlantic telephony and broadcasting. It is but one of a number of
devices Tesla had been drawing, was toying with, or was trying to sell
for commercial implementation.
Jerry Smith ponders the notion whether Tesla?s depression caused him to
experiment with real people. For example, the sinking of the French ship
Iena in 1907 was said to have been caused by an electrical spark. Tesla
was implicated by American inventor Lee De Forest, stating that Tesla
had experimented with ?a dirigible torpedo? capable of destroying ships.
Tesla sent his response to this serious accusation to The New York
Times, but rather than deny responsibility or involvement, he merely
stated that he had indeed built and tested such remotely controlled
torpedoes ? though did not claim he was responsible for the Iena
explosion. In another letter to the newspaper, dated April 21, 1908, he
reiterated the possibility of electrical wave destructions; we are a
mere two months before the Tunguska explosion, when he writes "This is
not a dream. Even now wireless power plants could be constructed by
which any region of the globe might be rendered uninhabitable without
subjecting the population of other parts to serious danger or
inconvenience." In 1915, he stated bluntly: ?It is perfectly practical
to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive
effects at a distance. I have already constructed a wireless transmitter
which makes this possible. [...] But when unavoidable [it] may be used
to destroy property and life. The art is already so far developed that
the great destructive effects can be produced at any point on the globe,
defined beforehand with great accuracy.? In favour of the ?Tesla
connection? is the fact that his transmitter could generate the energy
levels and frequencies capable of releasing the destructive force of 10
megatons, or more, of TNT. The nature of the explosion is consistent
with what would happen during the sudden release of wireless power. An
explosion caused by broadcast power would also not leave a crater.
Furthermore, reports of upper atmosphere and magnetic disturbances
coming from other parts of the world at the time of and just after the
Tunguska event point to massive changes in earth's electrical condition.
Tesla specifically claimed this phenomenon was one of the effects he
could achieve with his high power transmitter.
As Oliver Nichelson notes: ?When Tesla used his high power transmitter
as a directed energy weapon he drastically altered the normal electrical
condition of the earth. By making the electrical charge of the planet
vibrate in tune with his transmitter he was able to build up electric
fields that effected compasses and caused the upper atmosphere to behave
like the gas filled lamps in his laboratory. He had turned the entire
globe into a simple electrical component that he could control.? That in
itself is scary enough. But despite the possibility that he could have
been responsible for the Tunguska explosion, it nevertheless remains an
unproven allegation.

All of these scenarios sit on the border between science speculation and
science fiction. And Tunguska has indeed made it into fiction ? and some
of the fiction, it seems, has tried to make it back into science. In
1946, Soviet engineer Alexander Kazantsev published a science fiction
story in which a nuclear-powered Martian spaceship blew up in mid-air,
after taking on fresh water from Lake Baikal. This story then inspired
prominent Soviet scientist Alexei Zolotov to suggest that an
extraterrestrial spaceship might have exploded over Tunguska. Five
decades later, the TV documentary ?The Secret KGB UFO Files? would claim
that Tunguska was ?the Russian Roswell?, to be followed by the
announcement in 2004 that the grandiosely named ?the Tunguska Space
Phenomenon Public State Fund?, which organised an expedition in August
2004, led by Yuri Labvin, had recovered the wreck of this spacecraft
from the site. So far, it does not seem to have been put on public
display. Further, as soon as the 1960s, geochemist Kirill Florensky of
the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who led expeditions to the site in 1958,
1961, and 1962, reported that the only radioactivity in the Tunguska
trees could be explained as fallout from atomic bomb tests ? i.e.
Tunguska was not a nuclear explosion.

/A photograph, showing the damage done by the explosion/

Recently, the ?uniqueness? of the Tunguska explosion has been called
into question. In 1995, New Scientist reported that a similar event
might have transpired in the equally sparsely populated Brazilian jungle
in 1930. The event was reported in some newspapers at the time, and was
investigated by a Catholic missionary, Father Fidele d'Alviano, who
wrote a report for L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. Though
it seemed to take until 1995 before it was linked with Tunguska, as
early as 1931, Leonid Kulik, who initially investigated the Tunguska
explosion, mentioned the Brazilian incident.
The event occurred at 8am, August 13, 1930. Shortly before the explosion
along its border with Peru in northwestern Brazil, says d'Alviano, the
sun turned red and then the sky went totally dark, followed by a rain of
white ash and an ear-piercing whistle. Then three fireballs streaked
across the sky and exploded, their rumblings heard hundreds of
kilometres around. Months later, some of the affected forest was still
smouldering.
British astronomer Mark Bailey, of the Armagh Observatory argues that
three house-sized objects were probably involved, resulting in a
combined one-megaton explosion, or about a tenth of the estimated energy
released in the Tunguska Event. The event occurred at the height of the
annual Perseids meteor shower and were thus seen as a likely cause for
the destruction.

Despite this second anomalous explosion, which is, in truth, not as
mysterious as the Tunguska explosion, a century after the explosion
occurred, we are none the wiser. We do not know what it caused the
explosion; we only know that ?something? was responsible for a
tremendous amount of destruction. As we know so little about it,
Tunguska proves that vast areas can be totally destroyed by something we
have no idea what, and whether or not it will ever happen again. Worst
of all, it left not a single piece of concrete evidence from which we
could reconstruct what had happened. All we got, was a loud bang and an
explosion, and lots of fallen trees. It could have been much worse? or
perhaps whatever it was, was much worse than it should have been? We
simply do not know. And that is what is so scary about the Tunguska
explosion.