Tunguska event (nonfiction)

Trees knocked over by the Tunguska blast. Photograph from the Soviet Academy of Science 1927 expedition led by Leonid Kulik.

The Tunguska event was a large explosion that occurred near the Stony Tunguska River, in Yeniseysk Governorate, now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russian Empire, on the morning of 30 June 1908 (N.S.).

Description

The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened 2,000 km2 (770 sq mi) of forest but caused no known casualties.

The cause of the explosion is generally thought to have been a meteor.

It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the meteor is thought to have burst in mid-air at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than hit the surface of the Earth.

Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the superbolide's size, on the order of 60 to 190 metres (200 to 620 feet), depending on whether the meteor was a comet or a denser asteroid.

It is the largest known impact event on Earth in recorded history.

Research

Since the 1908 event, there have been an estimated 1,000 scholarly papers (mainly in Russian) published on the Tunguska explosion.

Many scientists have participated in Tunguska studies: the best known are Leonid Kulik, Yevgeny Krinov, Kirill Florensky, Nikolai Vladimirovich Vasiliev, and Wilhelm Fast.

In 2013, a team of researchers led by Victor Kvasnytsya of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine published analysis results of micro-samples from a peat bog near the center of the affected area showing fragments that may be of meteoritic origin.

Fiction cross-reference

• Tunguska Event Preservation Society

External links

• Tunguska event @ wiki.karljones.com
• Tunguska event @ Wikipedia