One early summer night, the biggest impact explosion in recorded human history occurred Russia. It’s been estimated to have dropped about as much much force as one of the most powerful thermonuclear bombs the US would ever detonate.
But on that day, nobody was lobbing bombs at Russia. Even in wartime, dropping that much fire power on a random bit of dirt by the Tunguska River, a plot of nothing in the middle of nowhere, would have been an unnecessary flex. This was 115 years ago, long before any research into the messy business of death-by-atom. Though there are theories, whatever lightly seared the planet that night is still debated by scientists.
My favorite wrong explanation is the teensy transient black hole.
Today’s Moment of Science… When the stars rained down on Siberia.
A bit past 7am on June 30th, 1908, the sky lit up bright as if it were mid-day. There were reports of a brilliant blue light moving across the sky, at least one eye witness describing it as “a second sun.” Then came something that sounded like artillery fire.
The explosion set off earthquake detectors, measuring a 5.0 magnitude quake. Effects traveled quickly and violently as the shockwave traveled. Glass broke and buildings shook hundreds of kilometers away. Trees burned and bent away from ground zero for a good 2,000 square kilometers around the blast. It lit up the night across Asia and Europe. The midnight sky in London was bright enough to read without artificial light; I can only assume they were using that light to interrogate the Bible for some hasty doomsday repentance (my band name).
One of the closest witnesses reported feeling like his clothes were on fire. He was forty miles away.
So what exactly was it? Probably not an unclaimed fart, but that’s on a long list of improbable ideas that haven’t been ruled out yet.
Attempts to explain this thing have included a gas leak, an ant-hill sized supervolcano, and yes, a motherfucking black hole. The idea is that a theoretical speck-sized black hole would hit Earth with the same impact as an asteroid with a grudge. This might make you ask why we need an alternate explanation for asteroids when we have… asteroids?
Because for something that made such an earth-shattering kaboom, it left nary a paperweight worth of readily identifiable space rock. There was also no hint of an impact crater.
Most explanations go ‘a chunk of something headed towards Earth then shit got weird.’
One explanation is that a meteor ‘grazed’ us, coming just close enough to really bang shit around before yeeting itself fucking anywhere else. But the pattern of the felled trees was radial out from one impact point. That at least seems to indicate there was a central explosion and not just fire from above.
Some folks keep holding onto hope that a meteorite must have landed somewhere and, despite decades of looking, we just haven’t found it. Researchers investigated if nearby Lake Cheko was caused by the impact, and it looked promising. The lake is the right shape to be caused by an impact, and an analysis of plant life in the lake did suggest a chemical signature change after 1908. However, the rate and amount of sediment buildup in the lake rules this one out as the final resting place for an exploding chunk of universe.
A meteor air burst is the current explanation with a reasonably high amount of credibility. It’s not merely a meteor that burned up before hitting the ground, oh no. It’s that a meteor got to Earth, said “the pressure is too much, welp, I’m out,” and motherfucking exploded. Hitting the atmosphere at particularly high speeds compresses the air impeding its path, raising the temperature. While many meteors simply disintegrate, sometimes all that pressure and heat builds up into an explosion in the air.
If none of these explanations are ever found to be true, it’s just a UFO that caused an explosion as big as a particularly cranky nuke. Probably no need for concern, I’ve written about way weirder shit from a Russian lab.
This has been your Moment of Science, still rooting for the itsy black hole.
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