Over 100 years after the most powerful explosion in documented history, researchers are still trying to figure out exactly what happened.
On 30 June 1908, an explosion ripped through the air above a remote forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river.
The fireball is believed to have been 50-100m wide. It depleted 2,000 sq km of the taiga forest in the area, flattening about 80 million trees.
The earth trembled. Windows smashed in the nearest town over 35 miles (60km) away. Residents there even felt heat from the blast, and some were blown off their feet. Fortunately, the area in which this massive explosion occurred was sparsely inhabited. There were no official reports of human casualties, though one local deer herderreportedly died after he was thrust into a tree from the blast. Hundreds of reindeer were also reduced to charred carcasses.
One eyewitness account said that "the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire…
"At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing."
This "Tunguska event" remains the most powerful of its kind recorded in history – it produced about185 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.
The fireball is believed to have been 50-100m wide. It depleted 2,000 sq km of the taiga forest in the area, flattening about 80 million trees.
The earth trembled. Windows smashed in the nearest town over 35 miles (60km) away. Residents there even felt heat from the blast, and some were blown off their feet. Fortunately, the area in which this massive explosion occurred was sparsely inhabited. There were no official reports of human casualties, though one local deer herderreportedly died after he was thrust into a tree from the blast. Hundreds of reindeer were also reduced to charred carcasses.
One eyewitness account said that "the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire…
"At that moment there was a bang in the sky and a mighty crash… The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or of guns firing."
This "Tunguska event" remains the most powerful of its kind recorded in history – it produced about185 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.
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