{Today’s lesson in Russian history concerns "the most powerful explosion in recorded history"; it has nothing to do with Rasputin's legendary temper tantrums.}
This is from Otto Friedrich’s The End of the World: A History:
On the early morning of June 30, 1908, a strange light could be seen in the eastern sky. In London, citizens telephoned the police to ask if a whole district of the city was on fire. Six British weather stations recorded mysterious oscillations in barometric pressure, and a similar installation in Potsdam recorded atmospheric shock waves traveling around the world in both directions. Something extraordinary had happened in the remote wilderness of Siberia, in the forest region inhabited only by a few Tunguska tribesmen and their reindeer. The newspaper Sibir (Siberia) carried a report from a correspondent in a town about six hundred miles southeast of the explosion. He quoted some tribal villagers as saying that a cylindrical column of flame had suddenly appeared in the sky, followed by a huge cloud of black smoke and then a thunderous crash. “All the buildings shook, and at the same time a forked tongue of flame broke through the cloud,” he reported. “All the inhabitants of the village ran out into the streets in panic. The old women wept. Everyone thought the world was ending.”
The world did not end; for all the local havoc it wreaked, the event was but a nine-days wonder. In fact, for twenty years, no one even investigated what had caused the explosion; in fairness, Russia was a nation in turmoil and at war for much of that time. Finally, in 1927, the Soviet Academy of Sciences dispatched an expedition to search the affected area. They discovered “a scene of almost unbelievable devastation. Within a radius of about twenty-five miles, almost all trees had been knocked down and were still lying flat, charred, their roots facing toward the center of the explosion. The few trees that were still standing had been stripped clean of all bark, like telephone poles.”
Villagers retained vivid memories of the event. A man who lived forty miles from the blast recalled, “A fiery blaze appeared in the northwest for a moment, which sent out such heat that my shirt was almost burned off me. An explosion came that threw me from the porch, then this kind of sound came that shook the whole house.” Another man, who had been a hundred and fifty miles away, had been plowing at the time: “My horse fell onto its knees. From the north side above the forest, a flame shot up; I saw that the fir forest had been bent over by the wind and I thought of a hurricane. The wind drove a wall of water up the Angara River.”
No one knows for sure what happened that day, though theories have been offered. “All the trees had been burned,” writes Otto Friedrich, “but no mere forest fire could cause an explosion that would level everything. A meteorite could have caused the destruction, but there was no sign of a crater. The tail of a comet might have caused the tiny globules of magnetic iron and silicate found in the area, but how could a comet reach Siberia without anyone on earth spotting it? All the evidence points to an explosion far above the earth’s surface, several miles high, and much of that evidence suggests an atomic explosion yielding about ten megatons. But how could such an event occur? There are fanciful theories about an accident involving a nuclear-powered spaceship from some other planet, about a black hole in space or a mysterious appearance of antimatter. We remain,” Friedrich concludes, “as ignorant as the Tunguska tribesmen who first saw, that day, a tower of fire.”
Not everyone agrees. William K. Hartmann, for instance, flatly declares, “At 7:17 AM on the morning of June 30, 1908, a mysterious explosion occurred in the skies over Siberia. It was caused by the impact and breakup of a large meteorite, at an altitude roughly six kilometers in the atmosphere.” So much for the “mysterious” nature of the explosion. Hartmann continues:
Witnesses in the town of Kirensk and nearby towns at the same distance recollected the fireball flashing across the sky in the following terms: "A ball of fire...coming down obliquely. A few minutes later [we heard] separate deafening crash like peals of thunder...followed by eight loud bangs like gunshots." "A ball of fire appeared in the sky... As it approached the ground, it took on a flattened shape..." "A flying star with a fiery tail; its tail disappeared into the air."
Adds Hartmann:
After this object passed across the sky, it approached the horizon where it was consistently described from this distance of 400 km, as appearing like a "pillar of fire," then replaced by "a cloud of smoke rising from the ground," or "a cloud of ash...on the horizon," or "a huge cloud of black smoke. "From a closer distance of around 200 km, several witnesses gave a better description of the object itself. It was called diffuse bright ball two or three times larger than the sun but not as bright; the trail was a "fiery-white band." Inconsistent colors were mentioned: white, red, flame-like, bluish-white. Perhaps it had a flame-like iridescence.
Finally, Hartmann produces some mathematical calculations, then concludes, “The Tunguska had an explosive energy roughly on order of 60 A-bombs, or 500 KT of TNT. It was closer in effect to that of a very large H-bomb.”
A 2016 BBC report calls the Tunguska event “the most powerful explosion in recorded history.” It notes that over 2000 square miles of forest were decimated and around 80 million trees flattened. The only human fatality was “a local deer herder who reportedly died after he was thrust into a tree from the blast.” Sadly, “Hundreds of reindeer were also reduced to charred carcasses.” Santa Claus must have wept.
According to the BBC, the Tunguska event "produced about 185 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb (with some estimates coming in even higher). Seismic rumbles were even observed as far away as the UK. And yet, over a hundred years later, researchers are still asking questions about what exactly took place on that fateful day. Many are convinced that it was an asteroid or a comet that was responsible for the blast. But very few traces of this large extraterrestrial object have ever been found, opening the way for more outlandish explanations for the explosion."
Among those outlandish explanations: “Some suggested the Tunguska event could have been the result of matter and antimatter colliding. When this happens, the particles annihilate and emit intense bursts of energy. Another proposal was that a nuclear explosion caused the blast; another was that an alien spaceship crashed at the site on its search for the fresh water of Lake Baikal.”
Wikipedia relates that Thomas Pynchon, in his novel Against the Day, “puts forth several possible explanations for the Tunguska event, which affects several of his main characters. Among these possibilities are a meteorite, alien visitation, temporal disturbance and a misdirected energy beam from Nikola Tesla.” 1 Stanislaw Lem suggested in one of his stories that Tunguska resulted from “the crash of an interplanetary reconnaissance vessel from a Venusian civilization.”
My own theory is that the event was a rupture of the time-space continuum caused by a faulty flux capacitor on a plutonium-powered DeLorean time machine. As you can see, Marty McFly made a lasting impact on Russian history and on the Siberian landscape:
Sources:
Otto Friedrich, The End of the World: A History
William Hartmann: 1908 SIBERIA EXPLOSION: Reconstructing an Asteroid Impact from Eywitness Accounts | Planetary Science Institute (psi.edu)
BBC - Earth - In Siberia in 1908, a huge explosion came out of nowhere
Tunguska event in popular culture - Wikipedia
1 If you are playing the “Russian History” edition of Clue, and you guessed “Nikola Tesla, in the Siberian wilderness, with an energy beam,” then you win! (We will accept “death ray” as well as “energy beam”.)
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