What do you think about this?
On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky over a remote stretch of Siberia split open. Reindeer herders camped near the Tunguska River saw a column of light brighter than the sun race across the sky. Then came a flash, a thunderclap heard hundreds of miles away, and a wave of heat so intense that men were thrown off their feet and knocked senseless. One herder said he felt as though his shirt had caught fire.
When the dust settled, roughly eight hundred square miles of forest had been flattened. An estimated eighty million trees lay on their sides, all pointing away from a single center, like matchsticks blown flat by one enormous breath. The blast carried the force of something like ten to fifteen megatons, close to a thousand times the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Here is the part that has puzzled scientists for over a century. There is no crater. Whatever did this never actually hit the ground. The leading explanation is that an asteroid or comet exploded in the air miles above the surface. But the first scientific expedition did not reach the site until 1927, almost twenty years later, and by then the evidence had nineteen winters to fade.
Makes you wonder how little warning we would get if the next one arrived tomorrow.
An asteroid airburst, a comet fragment, or something stranger still? What do you think tore open the sky over Tunguska?
