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Tunguska Blast Was a Small Asteroid

Posted by kdawson on from the fire-came-by dept.

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."

9 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. I've often wondered by Cally · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...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
    1. Re:I've often wondered by teebob21 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I've often wondered...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.

      Badly.

      --
      khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
  2. Re:Doh! by bennomatic · · Score: 5, Funny
    Aliens!

    In Soviet Russia, the forest flattens the asteroids!

    I welcome our new asteroid overlords.

    Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

    1. Flatten forest
    2. ???
    3. Profit!
    --
    The CB App. What's your 20?
  3. Re:Hmm.. by FredDC · · Score: 5, Informative

    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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  4. Re:The Gist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Pretty scary thinking about one of these things hitting on top of or near a major population center. Yes, every asteroid on television will undoubtedly hit over New York or Los Angeles. There must be some exceptionally high gravitational field at those locations.

    Perhaps these dramatic presentations aren't really that helpful. It could be that volcanoes won't erupt under Los Angeles, ice hurricanes won't hit New York, and 10.0 earthquakes won't toss Los Angeles into the Pacific Ocean (and why isn't Chicago or London ever destroyed?). It might be helpful for you to calculate the area that the Tunguska Blast caused devastation, divide by the surface area of the earth, multiply it by the surface area of our major population centers, and then multiply it by the probability of this type of event occurring in the next 50 years. But this is boring and lacks the 'scary thinking' and drama, right?
  5. Currently Reading. by Daemonax · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Currently Reading. by Farmer+Tim · · Score: 5, Funny

      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?

      Only one. Be very afraid.

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  6. Gitmo next for kdawson by mach1980 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  7. Re:Unlikely to be an asteroid by dreamchaser · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.