What Really Flattened Siberia in 1908? More Recent Event Offers Insight #asteroid #meteor #astronomy #explosion

One of my favorite podcasts tackled the Tunguska event, and this classic mystery seems well in hand. A huge explosion occurred over a remote and sparsely populated area in Siberia in 1908, and data was collected around the world.

Photographs and eye-witness accounts came from years later, but there was real-time data too:

Seismic readings taken from all over Eurasia indicated that Tunguska experienced a 5.0 earthquake from the shockwave.The barometric impact of the shockwave was recorded nearly everywhere as an atmospheric pressure wave of infrasound, even as far away as Washington, DC on the other side of the planet.Throughout Eurasia, the night sky was illuminated, consistent with the upper atmosphere ice crystals that would be expected to be created from an explosion of this magnitude. Skeptiod

A huge meteor has seemed a likely explanation for a long time. In January of 2018, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California held a workshop to apply a recent calibration to the analysis: the 2013 event over Chelyabinsk, Russia. We’ve got great information on that strike, including videos.

Past speculation on Tunguska embraced a lot of alternatives to a meteor, from aliens to secret early nuclear bomb experiments, but using what we learned from Chelyabinsk, the Tunguska event has been modeled “within the bounds of accuracy — to any practical degree — to confidently assert that it was the entry and explosion of a hypersonic superbolide, many times the size and with many times the energy of the similar Chelyabinsk event. Even though we don’t know everything, we do know that.”

Download your own copy of the NASA Workshop’s conclusions by clicking here.

Thanks to Skeptoid for their episode.

Sorry about no aliens…