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Tunguska Blast Was a Small Asteroid
malachiorion writes "The Tunguska event, an explosion on June 30, 1908, cleared an 800-sq.-mi. swath of Siberian forest. Was it a UFO crash? An alien weapons test? Now, Sandia National Laboratories has released its own explanation for the Tunguska event. Using supercomputers to create a 3D simulation of the explosion, the Department of Energy-funded nuke lab has determined that Tunguska was, indeed, the explosion of a relatively small asteroid. The simulation videos are well worth checking out — they show a fireball slamming into the earth from the asteroid's air burst. The researchers caution that we should be keeping watch for many more small, potentially earth-impacting asteroids than we are currently tracking."
It seems that while the asteroid itself did not cause as much damage as previously believed (3-5 megatons vs 10-20), the asteroid was most likely much smaller than had been estimated. Too bad the article doesn't give some numbers about the size. Pretty scary thinking about one of these things hitting on top of or near a major population center.
...how the populations (including the military) in some of the more... nervous areas of the globe would react to a suddden blinding light in the sky followed by an enormous blast wave.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
In Soviet Russia, the forest flattens the asteroids!
I welcome our new asteroid overlords.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Everybody knows it was Santa crash landing
This one they didn't notice until after it nearly missed earth.
So to answer your question: Yes, it's very possible!
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
Imagine a world where a small asteroid fragment or comet had struck Russia 60 years after Tunguska - during the depths of the Cold War. It would be a very different world today indeed.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's 'Rendezvous with Rama', which opens with the lines "Soon or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers -- a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe."
In the book, we humans then go on to set up systems to track asteroids that may be a danger to earth, and set up defense systems against them. I know that we currently track some, but how well funded are these organizations that do this? This is really something that is quite important, as it is almost certainly just a matter of when, not if. Do we have systems in place that will allow us to destroy or divert any large asteroids that are determined to be on a path to impact with earth?
A new study has been released proving that the fireball event in the server room was caused by slashdot and not an asteroid
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I'm not a US resident but isn't slashdotting/DoS-attacking a federally owned site a criminal/terror offence in the US?
Break the sound barrier - bring the noise.
42, It was a giant cum shot from god. Bye karma. I wish I could think of shit insightful to say.
A 3-5 megaton blast over the Atlantic wouldn't cause so much as a rough surf advisory in Key West. In comparison, the USA built a 45 megaton bomb and the USSR's fission-fusion-fission Tsar Bomba would have been 100+ megatons had they not taken the sensible precaution of replacing the final fission stage with inert lead. If a mere 5 megaton warhead could cause such worldwide devastation, I'm pretty sure someone would have mentioned it before now (and trust me, I've read just about every far-fetched doomsday scenario imaginable.)
As for the possibility of similar-sized asteroid impacting the ocean instead of exploding above it--well, the article only says that the asteroid is now thought to be "only a fraction as large as previously published estimates". That doesn't tell us anything. The Tunguska asteroid may or may not have been large enough to trigger a tsunami had it impacted an ocean instead of exploding over land. I'm going to assume that an impact will usually be less energetic (though perhaps more concentrated) than a heat-induced explosion, in which case no, the Tunguska asteroid never posed a significant threat to the world as a whole.
That said, the Tunguska explosion is still fascinating as hell. I know that there's a lot of very strong evidence pointing to the asteroid theory, but it's still fun to toy with conspiracy theories. The atomic bomb was first being conceived of, Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower was being tested (by some accounts, it was brought online the day before the explosion)... it's all absolute rubbish, to be frank, but it's very entertaining rubbish.
The computer simulation is interesting, but the Tunguska event is unlikely to be an asteroid. There were strange events reported in the area for days prior to the explosion, there were odd lights, etc.
An alternative explanation was proposed by Wolfgang Kundt, a researcher at the Institut für Astrophysik, University of Bonn:
Kundt W. (2001),
“The 1908 Tunguska catastrophe: An alternative explanation”,
Current Science, 81: 399–407.
The basic proposal is that there was a natural gas leak, from the Earth. The gas rose to a certain height, then drifted downwind. After several days, a lightning strike ignited the airborne gas, and the flame then traveled along line (of drifted gas), to the ground source.
It is worth reading the article. An asteroid impact is sexy, but the alternative explanation fits with the data much better.
It nearly HIT earth. The problem with the sentence is the verb, not the construction.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
OK, we shouldn't expect media people to know everything, but we are very poorly served by their almost total scientific ignorance. I suspect that politicians would have become interested in global warming much sooner were the mass media not so piss poor at explaining scientific issues to the public, and almost perversely proud of it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Yeah, Chuck Norris showed up...
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
"What else would it have been?"
The theory I've heard a few times was that it was anti-matter. Doctor Raymond Stanz, however, postulated that it may have been the result of a dimensional crossover. This theory has not been widely accepted, though, because no P.K. readings have been captured to support this claim.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The BBC's Horizon program ran a story about this last year
The videos total over 56 Megabytes, so I have put up a mirror Here
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Summaries on
You wont add "Is it the by homeopathy? Ayurveda perhaps" to an article on a new medicine/cure..
Editors/Firehosers note.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
This is what happens when you cross the streams. DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS!
Compelling evidence? Lets see...
1. That there have been far more events in recorded history similar to Tunguska which have been volcanic or geologic in nature... Mt. Saint Helens ... Krakatoa ... Lake Nyos... And which of these are examples of the supposed megaton range methane gas explosions? Why... none of them. Sorry, unrelated geophysical events don't provide any precedent for the proposed mechanism. The notion seems a bit difficult to buy into - the explosive limits for methane in air is usually quoted at 5-15% by volume, to make a mammoth blast you would need to establish this specific concentration range with millions of tons of methane, and have it ignited at the proper time. How does this happen geophysically? Any actual examples?
2. That there was swamp land in the center of the Tunguska caldera. This is a typical place for methane to build up. But... millions of tons? Capable of sudden release? People should be finding commercial exploitable methane gas deposits in the surface strata of swamps I should think.
3. The directions in which the trees had been knocked down indicated two discrete blast points some distance from one another. If this was observed, a twin asteroid would be a reasonable explanation (recent probe and radar evidence shows asteroids to frequently consist of loosely bound multiple bodies).
4. There were odd glowing clouds seen over the area in the nights leading up to the explosion which could be explained by methane collecting in the sky. Reports on the Tunguska event I have seen report glowing clouds in the sky afterward, not before.
5. No impact crater was found. Only the very rare iron asteroids are strong enough to make ground impact in this size range. The far more common stony bodies will fragment and explode in the air. This is a complete red herring.
6. No meteorite was found. This is a red herring like 5. It exploded high in the air. The extraterrestrial particles found are the meteorite.
The whole notion that this is an unprecedented event that requires alternate explanation is utterly wrong. Atmospheric explosions of extraterrestial bodies are regularly documented events. The Defense Support Program (DSP) has monitored atmospheric explosions since the 1960s and has found Hiroshima-sized (16 kt) events occurring about once a year. A simple statistical distribution permits calculating the frequency of larger events, a 10 Mt event is expected once very 120 years. See: an item about this in the Acoustical Society of America's newsletter. This being the case, there is really no anomaly here to be "explained away". Bolide explosions are a regular occurrence and we should see some in the megaton range in the historical record - most of course occur over open oceans and have had few witnesses and left no evidence.
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