http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Springer New York has published Vladimir Rubtsov’s book /The Tunguska Mystery/ (2009, hardcover, 328 pp., 49 illus, 11 in color; language: English; ISBN: 9780387765730). Now available in bookstores worldwide! Click here to order the book directly from Springer, or click here to buy now on Amazon.com. The Tunguska Event Photo Gallery Dr. *Arkady Voznesensky* (1864-1936), Director of the Magnetographic and Meteorological Observatory at Irkutsk from 1895 till 1917, the first scientist who understood that a gigantic space body had entered the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over Central Siberia. /Source/: Bronshten, V. A. /The Tunguska Meteorite: History of Investigations/. Moscow: A. D. Selyanov, 2000, p. 18. Dr. *Leonid Kulik* (1883-1942), the pioneer of Tunguska studies. Source: Krinov, E. L. /The Tunguska Meteorite/. Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1949, p. 4. Academician* Vladimir Vernadsky* (1863-1945), an eminent geochemist and inspirer of Tunguska investigations in the 1920s and 1930s. /Source/: Bronshten, V. A. /The Tunguska Meteorite: History of Investigations/. Moscow: A. D. Selyanov, 2000, p. 27. * Daniil Svyatsky* (1881-1940), a Russian historian of astronomy, the chief editor of the /Mirovedeniye/ (“Cosmography”) journal, who enthusiastically supported the search for the Tunguska meteorite in the 1920s. /Source/: Bronshten, V. A. /The Tunguska Meteorite: History of Investigations/. Moscow: A. D. Selyanov, 2000, p. 80. Dr. *Evgeny Krinov* (1906-1984), an eminent meteor specialist, Chairman of the Committee on Meteorites of the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1972 till 1984, a participant of the Great Tunguska expedition of the 1929-1930. /Source/: Bronshten, V. A. /The Tunguska Meteorite: History of Investigations/. Moscow: A. D. Selyanov, 2000, p. 99. * Alexander Kazantsev* (1906-2002), an engineer and sci-fi writer, whose hypothesis about the catastrophe of an extraterrestrial starship over Central Siberia gave the main impetus to the Tunguska studies in the USSR in the mid 20^th century. /Source/: /The Tunguska Phenomenon: 100 years of an unsolved mystery/. Krasnoyarsk: Platina, 2007, p. 43. Dr. *Kirill Florensky* (1915-1982), a Soviet geochemist and planetologist, a pupil of Academician Vladimir Vernadsky, who headed several Tunguska expeditions organized by the USSR Academy of Sciences. /Source/: Bronshten, V. A. /The Tunguska Meteorite: History of Investigations/. Moscow: A. D. Selyanov, 2000, p. 108. Dr. *Victor Zhuravlev,* a founding father of the ITEG – Interdisciplinary Tunguska Exploration Group – near the epicenter of the Tunguska explosion (the ITEG expedition of 2001). Behind him one can see a “telegraph tree” – that is a dead tree scorched and devoid of branches in 1908 at the moment of the explosion, but still standing upright. /Credit/: Konstantin Shkutov, Vanavara, Russia. Dr. *Gennady Plekhanov*, the Commander of the ITEG. /Credit/: Boris Bidyukov, Novosibirsk, Russia. Professor *Nikolay Vasilyev* (1930-2001), a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, the long-standing head of the ITEG, and the leading Soviet specialist in the Tunguska problem. /Source/: Vasilyev, N. V. /The Tunguska Meteorite: a Space Phenomenon of the Summer of 1908./ Moscow: Russkaya Panorama, 2004. Dr. *Alexey Zolotov*, (1926-1995), the famous student of the Tunguska problem, who dedicated all his energy to the search for a scientific proof of Kazantsev’s starship hypothesis and made a very important contribution to its further development. /Source/: Plekhanov, G. F. /The Tunguska Meteorite: Memoirs and Meditations/. Tomsk: University Publishing House, 2000, p. 211. Dr. *Wilhelm Fast* (1936-2005), mathematician, the “Newton of Tunguska”, who mapped the area of the leveled forest, preserving thereby a precise description of the most important trace of the Tunguska explosion for future generations of researchers. /Source/: Zhuravlev, V. K., Zigel, F. Y. /The Tunguska Miracle: History of Investigations of the Tunguska Meteorite/. Ekaterinburg: Basko, 1998, p. 42. * John Anfinogenov*, an eminent Tunguska investigator, who has participated in eighteen ITEG expeditions since 1965 and composed the map of the area of complete destruction of the taiga. /Source/: Zhuravlev, V. K., Zigel, F. Y. /The Tunguska Miracle: History of Investigations of the Tunguska Meteorite/. Ekaterinburg: Basko, 1998, p. 135. *Boris Bidyukov*, an engineer and psychologist from Novosibirsk, the long-standing head of thermoluminescent investigations at Tunguska which made it possible to discover traces of the hard radiation from the Tunguska explosion. Founder and chief editor of the /Tungussky Vestnik /(“Tunguska Herald”)/ /journal. /Credit/: Boris Bidyukov, Novosibirsk, Russia. * Victor Konenkin*, a schoolteacher from Vanavara who has discovered that the flying Tunguska space body had been seen not only to the south from the Great Hollow, but to the east as well, up to 500 kilometers from this site. /Source/: Zhuravlev, V. K., Zigel, F. Y. /The Tunguska Miracle: History of Investigations of the Tunguska Meteorite/. Ekaterinburg: Basko, 1998, p. 124. *Three Keys to an Unyielding Riddle* *Vladimir Rubtsov* * * * The nature of the Great Tunguska Explosion that occurred more than a century ago has remained enigmatic for a very long time. Today, however, we seem to approach the final solution of this enigma. Russian scientists have gathered a lot of valuable information about consequences of the event and are now developing its hypothetical model that must fit all collected data. * * * *1. An Enigma Wrapped Up in a Mystery* On the sunny morning of June 30, 1908, over the wastes of Central Siberia, there flew a fiery space body. Its motion was accompanied by powerful sounds resembling the firing of large-caliber pieces of ordnance. Even though this region of the Russian Empire was very sparsely populated, thousands of local inhabitants saw and heard it. In 1908, political exile T. N. Naumenko lived in the old Russian village of Kezhma, on the Angara river, some 200 km south-south-west from the epicenter of the explosion. Later he recalled: “The day was sunny and absolutely clear – not a cloud in the sky; no wind at all; complete silence. I was facing north. At about 7 o’clock the Sun was already quite high in the sky when there was a hardly audible sound of thunder. It was far away but it increased. There was a weak clap of thunder and I quickly turned to the south-east, towards the Sun. Its rays were being crossed from the right by a broad fiery-white stripe. On the left an elongated cloudy mass was flying to the north. It was even brighter than the stripe – dimmer than the sun’s disk but almost as bright as its rays. A few seconds after the first clap of thunder, there was a second much louder. The flying lump was no longer visible, but its tail (the stripe) was now to the left of the Sun’s rays. It was getting broader than it was when on the right. Almost immediately there followed a third clap of thunder, so powerful that the earth trembled and a deafening rumble resounded over the boundless Siberian taiga”. When flying at 7 hours 14 minutes of local time (0 hours 14 minutes GMT) over the so-called Southern swamp, a small morass not far from the Podkamennaya Tunguska river, the body exploded, releasing the TNT equivalent of 40 to 50 megatons of explosive. That is equivalent to about /three thousand /atomic bombs of the kind dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. There was a brilliant flash and a devastating blast. Had this occurred over St.-Petersburg, London or New York an entire city would have been destroyed. But the settlement nearest to the place of explosion proved to be the little trading station of Vanavara, which was 70 kilometers away. The explosion leveled some 30 million trees in the taiga and produced an earthquake, whose seismic waves were recorded in Russia at Irkutsk, Tashkent, Tbilisi, as well as in Jena in Germany. Some local Siberian newspapers soon published eyewitness accounts that led to journalists writing that a huge meteorite had hit the taiga. In the spring of 1921, having read an old newspaper report, meteorite specialist Leonid Kulik realized that he might followed up on its contents to make important discoveries. It took six years to persuade the Russian Academy of Sciences to allocate necessary funds for an expedition to Tunguska. However, in February 1927 Leonid Kulik and his assistant Oswald Guelich at last left Leningrad for Siberia. They arrived at Vanavara on March 25. *2. When Pieces and Patterns Confront* Five days later the explorers entered the area of fallen wood. Kulik described the scene in his diary in the following way: “I am still unable to sort out the chaos of the impressions that I took from that excursion and I even cannot imagine the whole colossal scale of this extraordinary meteorite fall. Here is a very hilly, almost mountainous locality, extending for tens of kilometers behind the northern horizon. From our observation point one can see no sign of living forest: everything has been leveled and scorched... It is so terrible to see the giants with a diameter of about one meter broken in two like a thin reed with their tops thrown aside for many meters to the south”. On May 30, 1927, the expedition arrived at a vast hollow surrounded by mountains, and the expedition’s camp was set up in this site that Kulik named the Great Hollow. And when he surveyed the directions of the fallen trees he discovered to his surprise that the forest had been put down in a radial manner. Finding the only area of radially leveled forest existing on our planet was an opening shot in the whole of Tunguska studies. Leonid Kulik’s second important discovery during this expedition was a vast zone (eight kilometers across) of trees scorched and devoid of branches, looking like telegraph poles, standing upright at the center of the radially leveled forest. A third discovery was to follow. Traces of “unusual burns” were found on fallen and living trees. These traces were very different from the consequences of a usual forest fire. They remained even on isolated pieces of dry land separated by water, including single trees growing among the swamps. Not only trees and bushes, but even marsh moss had kept these fiery marks. Nothing but a light flash could have produced such results. Between 1927 and 1939 Leonid Kulik organized several expeditions to Tunguska, during which he attempted to find large pieces of the gigantic iron meteorite, whose fall had had to produce, as he believed, all this devastation in the taiga. His last expedition occurred in 1939. But no traces of the meteorite were found. Kulik’s attempts to solve the Tunguska mystery had failed. In June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Leonid Kulik, who was already 57 years old, joined the people’s volunteer corps to defend his country. The volunteers were encircled and captured. Kulik, wounded in the leg, became a male nurse in a German concentration camp for Soviet prisoners of war. It was hellish work, and although his Siberian travels had hardened him he got typhus and died on April 14, 1942. But the meteorite that Leonid Kulik did not find has become his most important discovery. This is not a play on words. This is a fact. Subsequent history of Tunguska investigations has proved it. *3. The Great Idea* In August 1945, Colonel Alexander Kazantsev was returning from Austria to Russia. His civil profession was mechanical engineering and by that time he was already the author of several important inventions and was also writing science-fiction. Just before the war his first SF novel /The Burning Island /had been published. So when driving through Hungary and listening to the radio he heard about Hiroshima and the atomic bomb, he began to relate this to the Tunguska event. Kazantsev knew that no meteorite crater had been found at Tunguska. There had in fact been a zone of standing trees at the center of the area of fallen forest. And now, while driving back to Moscow, Kazantsev was surprised by the close similarity of the Tunguska and Hiroshima explosions. Couldn’t this mean, thought Kazantsev, that the Tunguska space body exploded in the air and that perhaps the explosion was nuclear? Wasn’t this an extraterrestrial spacecraft that had exploded when trying to land on our planet? By that time Kazantsev was going to retire from the army and return to writing – he had already submitted an application to the Union of Soviet Writers. It is therefore hardly surprising that, instead of writing a factual science article, he put his hypothesis as a science-fiction short story. The story was entitled “The Explosion” and it was published in the popular geographical journal /Vokrug Sveta /(“Around the World”) at the beginning of 1946. Readers were highly interested. Both professional astronomers and science amateurs were well aware of the results of the pre-war Kulik’s expeditions. They very soon saw that the model of the Tunguska event, proposed by Alexander Kazantsev, was not a simple literary device. It did explain the most unusual aspects of the Tunguska phenomenon. So the idea itself was not mad and could be discussed on a rational level. But the Chief of the academic Committee on Meteorites (KMET) Academician Vasily Fesenkov and its Learned Secretary Dr. Evgeny Krinov had taken Kazantsev’s encroachment upon their right to decide about the nature of bodies coming from space as an act provoking holy war, not as a basis for rational discussion. Their position was clear: extraterrestrial spaceships belong between the covers of science fiction books; meteorites are a subject for science. Meteorite specialists believed that no enigma of the Tunguska meteorite existed. They refused to accept the overground character of the explosion and insisted that the space body had exploded when hitting the ground. It might be a stony asteroid or the core of a small comet and, of course, the impact had to leave in the Great Hollow a large crater. Well, perhaps it had been inundated with some water... This seemed to the Committee on Meteorites so obvious that for ten years they even did not try to verify this supposition by sending a new expedition to the taiga. The first post-war academic expedition was sent to Tunguska in the summer of 1958. Its participants have investigated the only possible place at the center of the Great Hollow that could have been the impact crater formed by the Tunguska meteorite – that is the Southern swamp. However, it proved to be just a usual forest swamp with an undisturbed bed and without any signs of meteoritic substance. Also, the standing “telegraph” trees, devoid of branches, testified clearly that no cosmic body had ever fallen at this place. So, when reporting the results of the expedition to the academic authorities, the scientists had to conclude that the Tunguska space body exploded at a great altitude in the air, and not when hitting the ground. Somehow, Alexander Kazantsev was not mentioned in the final report of the expedition – not even in passing. Having been inspired with the fact that the “heretical supposition” about the overground character of the Tunguska explosion was tested and proved correct, several young Siberian scientists and engineers, living and working in the city of Tomsk, created the Independent Tunguska Exploration Group (ITEG). Initially the Group consisted of twelve people. Gennady Plekhanov, then 32, a physician and engineer, became the chief of ITEG. The main aim of the team was a thorough examination of the Tunguska taiga and search for all traces that could have remained after the enigmatic event. To start with, it was necessary to determine the true shape of the zone of leveled wood. Theoretically, it must have resembled a usual ellipse of dispersion formed when a meteorite, however enormous, falls to Earth. But whether or not this was so still remained unknown... *4. The First Key: the Leveled Forest* Despite serious disagreements concerning the nature of the Tunguska event, the academic Committee on Meteorites and the Independent Exploration Group did for some time work together. In 1961 they organized a joint expedition of 80 members to the taiga. A considerable part of the expedition (more than one third) was engaged in mapping the felled forest, and the results were traced on the map. And step by step, before the eyes of amazed scientists there appeared the real contour of this area. Instead of an ellipse, it resembled a gigantic spread-eagled butterfly, its “wingspan” reaching 70 kilometers and the length of the “body” 55 kilometers. The area of this zone was about 2150 square kilometers. Surprisingly, in spite of its complicated shape, all leveled trees lay strictly radially – which meant the forest had been flattened by a blast, and not by a ballistic shock wave from the disintegrating body. True, having not leveled a single tree, the ballistic shock wave had nevertheless to alter somewhat the directions in which trees fell. To the left and to the right of the TSB trajectory there must have formed a band of trees lying not strictly radially. After all, the Tunguska space body was a material object that definitely compressed the air in flight... And such a band was found. Or rather two were found – one of them running to the west-north-west and the other practically to the west. Did this mean that over the Great Hollow in June 1908 two space bodies had flown – one from the east-south-east and the other from the east? But this was not the whole story. After a thorough investigation it turned out that to the west from the epicenter of the Tunguska explosion the radial leveling lacked: there ran a “corridor of poles” that could be seen over a distance of some 20 kilometers. It followed from this fact that one of these bodies had survived the fiery bath and continued its motion to the west. *5. The Second Key: the Light Burn* A second significant discovery, made by the joint expedition in 1961, was finding the traces of the light burn, which had surprised Leonid Kulik so much 34 years before. Certainly, the burn of the trees, generated by the light flash of the Tunguska explosion, is the second most important, and the second largest, trace of this great event. True, the zone of the radiation burn is considerably less than the zone of the leveled forest. It is some 18 km long, 12 km wide, and covering an area of about 200 square kilometers. In shape it resembles an egg, the axis of symmetry being directed almost exactly from the east to the west – that is coinciding with the ballistic trace of the second Tunguska body. Having examined the traces of burning, the scientists calculated that the proportion of the radiation of light in the overall radiation of energy from the explosion was very high: not less than 10% and perhaps even 25%. The explosion was therefore not only a high-altitude one, but also rather like a nuclear explosion. No chemical explosion can produce such a high yield of light energy. *6. The Third Key: Storms in the Magnetosphere* In 1958 American geophysicists made an unexpected discovery. It turned out that man had obtained the ability to produce geomagnetic disturbances in the atmosphere – namely, local geomagnetic storms lasting up to one hour, or more. These local geomagnetic storms were recorded, for the first time, in August 1958, when powerful thermonuclear charges exploded over a small island in the Pacific at altitudes of 76 and 42 kilometers. Very soon, scientists uncovered the cause of this effect. It was the fiery ball of the nuclear explosion, producing intense radiation and neutron fluxes. Under the influence of this radiation the level of ionization of the ionosphere increases sharply, producing electric currents that creates a magnetic disturbance. But a similar geomagnetic effect occurred several minutes after the Tunguska explosion! It was recorded on magnetometers of the Irkutsk Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory, but forgotten about for many years. Only in the summer of 1959 did Dr. Kim Ivanov, a young but already experienced geophysicist working at this Observatory, find these records in its archives. During seven hours before the explosion of the Tunguska space body, the geomagnetic field was very calm. At 0 h 20 min GMT, that is six minutes after this body exploded, the intensity of the geomagnetic field increased abruptly, reaching its maximum value at 0 h 40 min GMT. It remained at the same level for the next 14 minutes and then began to decrease. But the initial undisturbed level of the geomagnetic field returned only five hours later. This process differed utterly from usual natural geomagnetic storms generated by solar flares, being identical to artificial geomagnetic storms generated by nuclear explosions in the upper atmosphere. But the local geomagnetic storm is still not the strangest aspects of the Tunguska catastrophe. At least, it originated as a result /after /the explosion. There existed also a “magnetic precursor” of the Tunguska phenomenon. We mean here the so-called “Weber effect”. Professor L. Weber, working at a laboratory of Kiel University, Germany, observed from June 27 till June 30 a very unusual geomagnetic effect. He reported in a German astronomical journal: “Several times, during many hours, were permanently observed small regular oscillations with an amplitude of two angular minutes and period of three minutes. These variations are not attributable to any known causes (say, to the disturbances arising from tramways)”. These variations of geomagnetic field were recorded three times. The first, at 6 pm, June 27, lasted 7 hours 30 minutes, until 1.30 am, June 28. These oscillations recurred exactly at the same time interval on June 28-29 from 6 pm till 1.30 am. Next day, that is June 29, they commenced at 8.30 pm – to stop forever at 1.30 am again. This time the oscillations lasted only 5 hours. The interval between the influences was 24 hours exactly. Perhaps the only association that comes to mind in this connection is the idea of a satellite traveling in an elliptical orbit with a period of 24 hours and its closest point over Germany. If such a satellite was the source of a powerful magnetic field it could have influenced Professor Weber’s magnetometer. So what picture emerges from all the above? It seems that on the sunny morning of June 30, 1908, there appeared over Central Siberia /two /space bodies, one of them flying from the south-east (or even, judging from eyewitness testimonies, directly from the south – but maneuvering) and the other from the east. One of these bodies did explode over the Great Hollow, whereas the other survived and flew farther to the west, where at this time a third space body was flying in an elliptical orbit over Western Europe. *7. In Search for a Solution of the Century-Old Enigma* How can this complicated picture be explained? Do we need to suppose a sort of aerospace battle between two or more extraterrestrial spaceships? Not necessarily. Recently, a St.-Petersburg group of Tunguska researchers (Dr. Heinrich Nikolsky, Edward Schultz, Dr. Vladimir Schnitke, Dr. Maxim Tsynbal, and Professor Yury Medvedev) put forward a new hypothesis, according to which the Tunguska space body was after all a comet. Having touched the Earth’s upper atmosphere, it was captured by the gravitational field of our planet and settled into an elliptical orbit, its perigee being over Antarctica. This comet made four revolutions around Earth, during the last of them moving along the 101^st eastern meridian and gradually losing altitude. Somewhere over the Angara river the space body divided into several fragments, whose explosions devastated the taiga. Whether or not this model fits well /all /circumstances of the Tunguska event – say, the powerful light flash, the local geomagnetic storm and especially the Weber effect – remains an open question, but the model itself is certainly interesting and worthy of further development. *8. The Penultimate Inch* During the 20^th century the public has often read: “The Great Enigma of the Tunguska Meteorite Has Been Solved!” But such statements were premature. Scientific research starts from /seeing a problem/. It is a crucially important stage on the way to real knowledge. With all due respect to Leonid Kulik and his fellow-researchers, their meteorite model of the Tunguska space body was based on an inadequate understanding of the problem. However, we do now have the opportunity to solve the problem. For that we need to harness the facts already discovered and build a multidisciplinary picture of the Tunguska event. Of course, some essential bits of empirical information are still needed, and these will have to be gathered from the site. But the amount of data needed will hardly be very large because the road to a final solution of the Tunguska problem has already been paved by generations of Tunguska researchers. * Further Reading: * 1. Rubtsov, V. /The Tunguska Mystery/. N.Y.: Springer, 2009 (in English). 2. Bidyukov, B. F. (Ed.) /The Tunguska Phenomenon: Multifariousness of the Problem/. Novosibirsk: Agros, 2008 (in Russian). 3. Vasilyev, N. V. /The Tunguska Meteorite: A Space Phenomenon of the Summer of 1908/. Moscow: Russkaya Panorama, 2004 (in Russian). 4. Bronshten, V. A. /The Tunguska Meteorite: History of Investigations/. Moscow: A. D. Selyanov, 2000 (in Russian). 5. Zhuravlev, V. K., and Zigel, F. Y. /The Tunguska Miracle: History of Investigations of the Tunguska Meteorite/. Ekaterinburg: Basko, 1998 (in Russian). 6. Dmitriev, A. N., and Zhuravlev, V. K. /The Tunguska Phenomenon of 1908 as a Kind of Cosmic Connections Between the Sun and the Earth/. Novosibirsk: IGIG SO AN SSSR, 1984 (in Russian). 7. Zolotov, A. V. /The Problem of the Tunguska Catastrophe of 1908/. Minsk: Nauka i Tekhnika, 1969 (in Russian). 8. Tronov, M. V. (Ed.) /The Problem of the Tunguska Meteorite/. Vol. 2.Tomsk: University Publishing House, 1967 (in Russian). 9. Plekhanov, G. F. (Ed.) /The Problem of the Tunguska Meteorite/. Tomsk: University Publishing House, 1963 (in Russian). 10. Krinov, E. L. /The Tunguska Meteorite/. Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1949 (in Russian).