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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!
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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?
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.
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.
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 videos total over 56 Megabytes, so I have put up a mirror Here
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
It is worth reading the article. An asteroid impact is sexy, but the alternative explanation fits with the data much better. And how does a natural gas explosion leave the nickel and iridium deposits that were found at the site? An asteroid impact is not the accepted theory because it is "sexier", but because of Occam's razor.
You're wrong.
One of many references if you'd bothered to look: http://www.physorg.com/news819.html
Pertinent section:
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, and indicated that they were of extraterrestrial origin.
I've seen the 'natural gas' theory before. It's so contrived that it's almost like science-comedy.