Solving the Mystery of the Tunguska Explosion

What is it about?

The Tunguska explosion is an explosion event that occurred at 7:17 a.m. on June 30, 1908, over what is now Siberia's evinci region in Russia. The explosion occurred 800 kilometers northwest of Lake Baikal near the tunguska river. The estimated explosive power is equivalent to 20 million tons of TNT, or the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs! More than 80 million trees burned over 2,150 square kilometers. In the morning, locals in the northwest of Lake Baikal reportedly observed a huge fireball as bright as the sun streak across the sky, which was illuminated a few minutes later by a bright flash of light. Later, shockwaves from the explosion shattered windows in the vicinity of 650 kilometers, and the mushroom cloud was observed. The explosion was recorded by seismic monitoring sites across Europe and Asia, and the resulting atmospheric instability was even detected by the barometrograph, which had just been developed by famous scientists in Britain at the time. In the days after the explosion, the sky over Tunguska, 9,000 miles away, was shrouded in a grim orange, the phenomenon of white nights continued in large areas and the night sky was dark red in Asia and Europe. A decrease in atmospheric transparency was also observed at the Smithsonian Astrophysics Station and Mount Wilson Observatory in the United States for at least a few months. At the time of the explosion many lights went out in London, England, and the city was in darkness. The soil in the explosion area was magnetized. Trees in the explosion area grew faster; the width of the ring increased from 0.4-2 mm to more than 5 mm; genetic variation occurred in some animals, reindeer had a strange skin disease, jujube leper skin disease and so on. No impact crater was found; But Italian nuclear physicists found by heavy isotopes test that the fir trees destroyed in 1908 had higher levels of trace elements than in other years, and those trace elements could not come from earth. There was no sign of a radiation anomaly, indicating that it was not a natural nuclear fission explosion. A series of unknowns and doubts have given rise to various hypotheses over the past 100 years,which can be summarized as the "meteorite impact hypothesis ", the "nuclear explosion hypothesis ", the "alien spacecraft explosion hypothesis ", the "antimatter hypothesis " and the "comet impact hypothesis ". Each hypothesis has a certain truth, and each hypothesis can’t stand up to scrutiny. So far, no very reasonable explanation has been found.

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Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash

Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The Tunguska explosion is an unsolved natural mystery that shocked the world at the beginning of the 20th century.The Tunguska explosion is the largest explosion ever to have occurred on Earth. This study provides a reasonable scientific explanation for the Tunguska explosion for the first time.

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