In just over a year, we will be marking the centennial of the Tunguska event. Anyone making plans to celebrate?

I'm not looking for stuff that should be in the long term section, but an actual celebration.

Whoa, 100 years already?! Hmmm, that sounds like a good reason to dust off my glassware and whip up something to remind people what happened then.

I think the hypothesis it was a comet hitting the atmosphere makes a lot more sense than some of the other thoughts. What do you think it was?

-Blast

Comet would explain the "light night", as might a rocky meteor.

I can't buy the "spontanious nuke" theory, and I'd also discount the "lost motor home" one to- you can't cross space with a fission reactor, and if you have fusion availble to you why not use it on your scouts? And if you crack a fusion reactor... big deal, you let the cold air in and the plasma dies down. Yes, everyone in a few thousand yards is kinda hosed but you don't get a 20 Kt bang. :P

I'm just glad it happened then, and not 50 or 60 years later.

If I may ask, what are yall talking about????

20 Megaton atmospheric explosive detonation in Siberia about about 53 years before the Russians dropped anything of such an equivalent size called the Tsar Bomb

Late June (29th or 30th, I don't remember), 1908, in the middle of Siberia something exploded with a force in the 20 kiloton range. The rattle was picked up on seismic instruments in the UK, and the difussion of light through atmospheric particulates was such that there was no night in northern Europe for two or three days. No ground crater, it was an airbursting whatever it was.

There are a couple of theories. My personal favorite is that it was a baby comet that blew due to air friction; the meteor theory parallels it but it would have to be a stony meteor becuase the Soviets got nothing on MAD sensors when they did an aerial survey in the 50s. Others theories that are almost possible but rather doubtful include a really tiny peice of antimatter, say about 20 times the size of what we have in the vault at fermilab, or micro singularity, a pin head blackhole. (Both would explain why some reindeer had what appear to be rad burns, but there is some mathematical evidence that any blast that big will have some radiation.) Going down the scale of oddness, you have the possiblity that a meteorite of something that could be compressed until it reached critical mass did a grav dive before cooking off.

Then there is a peice of actually halfway decent science fiction from the late 40s, early 50s from a professor in the Soviet Union who suggested that it was the powerpack on a UFO going critical. Honestly, if I had to ride a busted ship down to Earth in northern summer, I might steer for Siberia myself, bail out, hit the PLB and wait for my version of a Pave Low to show up. It's still one of those places you reach by going to the middle of nowhere and keep going for a few days. But honestly, if you can build a starship, you probably have fusion reactors, not fission. Fusion bottles aren't likely to be able to go off like that- you let the heat out and the reaction will stop, it will just be a splash of star-hot plasma that will take care of everything for a ways.

The reason why I asked if anyone here was going to or knew of plans to celebrate is becuase it is a little killer lump of something from space. And lets face it, if had happened over a Warsaw Pact or NATO nation in the 50s, the internet would have been invented by a cockroach. :P It is a little bit TEOTWAWKI, but it's also kinda cool. As a group we are odd enough that someone might celebrate it. Other than me.

Memorial might be a better term.

Memorial might be a better term.

Why? No one was killed.

You want a really scary thought, think about what would have happened if this hadn't air-burst? Either ground-level, in the ocean, etc? And you're right about if it had happened a few decades later...

There's actually something on the history channel about it tonight.

Found this link on research into the event:
http://www.icr.org/research/index/researchp_sa_r05/
Not sure about the celebration though

The explosion had the force of a very lage nuclear bomb, but do we know if it such an incident would cause an EMP pulse?

-Blast

IIRC, the area where the blast was centered was pretty swampy. Any fragments from a metorite probably sank to the bottom of the bog.

We might also want to check if Blast had any ancestors living in the area back then...

The scanned the entire area with what ammounts to giant metal detectors and didn't find anything. This ruled out your normal meteorite/asteroid type objects.

My ancestors were already in the USA by then but I'm trying to get sent to an oil field in Siberia next summer. Maybe I'll be able to check things out.

-Blast

What if it had happened in 1957?

But it didn't, it happened in 1908. That's why celebrate an unusual phenomena of nature.

Think of it this why- you celebrate you kid's birthday, but if you had him when you were 13 (does happen) it might be more of a memorial.

Or maybe we're both failing at this talking/typing thing. :P

Not very big. 20kt is in that funny "operational" range where it is too big be a tacnuke, and realistically too small be to really be a strategic yield by today's standards. It's a nice city buster, but not "big". "Big" means "mega".

As far as an EMP.... helluva good question. Nuclear physics and atomic chemistry both baffle me a bit outside of how to make the things that go boom, so I don't even follow the math that suggests a non-nuclear explosion of that magnitude would result in a release of alpha and/or beta particles. I just know that there is a theory that suggests it. I'd doubt it though.

Actually it was the Borg. Having gone back in time to conquer Earth, while we are weak and easy, the Borg ship had a magnetic constrictor failure that safeguards the gonculator and prevents the discombobulators from allowing the matter/anti-matter mix chamber to fail, thus resulting in a small anti-matter explosion that destroyed all evidence of the Borg and their ship.

You didn't hear the real explanation from me because only the President and myself know that I am here!!! Shshshshsh

Good overview, but I'm questioning of the 10-15 megaton estimate, that's a lot higher than any of the other's I've come across.

*grins* Something to research! I was looking forward to being bored in a few weeks when my current project should be wrapping up. Yay!

To the best of my memory, it was in the 10-15 KT range. About the same size of what we dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

Most estimates are a little bigger, around 20kt. That's why the use of megatons in that article boggled my mind. Might be that their "science editor" doesn't know his prefixes or thinks that "megaton" is just for coolness factor, but since it is based on seismic data I'm wanting to look into it. I'd never heard of a seismic estimate for the event, only blast pattern based ones.

The best estimates for the yield are between 12 and 20 Megatons. This estimate was done purely from the blast radius of about 20-25 Km together with the blast pattern. The object that impacted at Tunguska is still a mystery, simply because of the lack of any crater and little physical remains which were left from the object which impacted, hence theories such as antimatter and microscopic singularities. The altitude of the explosion is calculated from the atmospheric over pressure and the amount of energy coupling with the ground. i.e. the seismic recordings. There was also very little particle radiation from nuclear fallout at the Tunguska site.

The eye witness reports are very interesting indeed, they describe what would be the equivalent of an air burst thermonuclear detonation. i.e. Descriptions of a blinding blueish light from another sun then of the sky splitting in two. Even descriptions of a central swirling cloud moving upwards are reminiscent of an air burst thermonuclear explosion. A purely thermonuclear reaction would have only given a huge neutron burst (mostly absorbed to form carbon isotopes for example and little to no heavy isotope particle radiation).

The most likely candidate for the object which struck the Tunguska site would be a small comet. This theory also has problems due to the lack of a crater. I would be inclined to go along the lines of something quite small (a ball of Deuterium and Tritium plasma weighing only Kgs), traveling at relativistic velocities emanating from the sun or near the sun (ejected from the suns chromosphere possibly), which could generate the above 150 million degree heat needed for a thermonuclear reaction when it impacted the upper atmosphere above Tunguska.

Just saw this over at fox news,

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,286807,00.html

Not all of humanity is equal. The atrocities of the Soviet regime speak for themselves.

-Blast, taking a drink

I'm gonna become a lush reading some of these posts...

They might come in handy when the next asteroid or comet comes winging it's way through our cosmic neighborhood.

I am going to chase this mucky yucky stuff with a beer, as soon as I hit the beach.

Arrrrgggghghhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think you just watched Dr. Strangelove and took it a bit too seriously.

"I can no longer sit back and allow PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER. infiltration, PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER. indoctrination, PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER. subversion and the international PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER. conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

They think if the collision had occurred only 4 hours 47 minutes later, it would have wiped out St. Petersburg, due to the rotation of the Earth.

The Fog of War

*pats Leigh on the head*

You were out without your tinfoil hat, weren't you.

Without looking, I'm guessing "drink".

-Blast

"Ziggy Sakky, Ziggy Sakky, Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!"

Yikes! Kind of a Japanese version of the Nazi angel of Death, Dr. Mengele.

-Blast