The Tunguska Mystery 100 Years Later (2008)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-tunguska-mystery-100-years-later/

by olivermarks • 3 years ago

94 76 3 years ago

scientificamerican.com

bastawhiz3• 3 years ago

Was there a follow-up? This was written fifteen years ago.

loloquwowndueo• 3 years ago

“115 years later” doesn’t have as nice a ring to it :)

mikequinlan• 3 years ago

June 30, 2008

_qua• 3 years ago

Seems that there were follow up studies after this one in 2008 which raise doubts about the conclusion that the lake was formed by an impactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

echelon• 3 years ago

The article on the lake itself [1] seems to paint a different picture - contradictory evidence and a lack of certainty.

While the recent 2017 study cites core samples, earlier studies suggested that sediments were not a part of the lake formation. I don't think there's enough detail in the Wikipedia articles to really shed light on this. Every study seems to reach different conclusions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Cheko

---

Edit: You nerd-sniped me. Here's a meteor that produced an earth-grazing fireball over Utah and exited back into space:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Great_Daylight_Fireball

I gotta get back to work...

mock-possum• 3 years ago

Seems very romantic. That fireball is still out there somewhere. We might never see it again.

virgulino• 3 years ago

"First expedition to depths of Lake Cheko close to epicentre of Tunguska event to start in February", Siberian Times, February 2022

https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/first-expedition...

JoeAltmaier3• 3 years ago

Have to mention the Tesla/Robert Peary conspiracy theory. The date Tunguska happened Tesla had asked Robert Peary to observe any unusual weather phenomena. None were reported.

Tesla had reputedly activated his energy transmitter at Wardencliff, focused on Peary's location. If you draw that line (Wardencliff to Peary's expedition location) and double it, you have the Tunguska forest.

Izkata• 3 years ago

Hm..

In 1946, for instance, science-fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev explained the puzzling scene by positing a scenario in which an alien spacecraft had exploded in the atmosphere.

Maybe Tesla shot down a UFO, and it self-destructed to prevent their technology from falling into our hands.

thriftwy• 3 years ago

Or, as in Strugatsky brothers plot, the aliens were moving back in time so they continued living on in the age XIX, and perhaps left after repairs.

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

Known to the Beta-Centaurians as The Earth Event. It essentially scuttled all further exploration of our solar system.

bdhcuidbebe• 3 years ago

since its now written down, its basically established facts. /s

dopidopHN• 3 years ago

Tomorrow in your friendly neiboorhoud LLM outputs !

wheelerof4te2• 3 years ago

There's no doubt that Nikola Tesla possesed some, let's not say a weapon, but knowledge about a very advanced way to cause mass destruction for it's time.

In a way, his mind was that weapon. And it's a good thing, too. Imagine someone else with that kind of knowledge.

bastawhiz3• 3 years ago

I think there's a lot of doubt, actually. He was very smart but he was not a magician.

Oxidation3• 3 years ago

He didn't have more knowledge than we do now, 100 years, trillions of research dollars and millions of engineers later. He had a very amazing and intuitive sense of electricity, mechanics and physics in general, as well as an eidetic memory but it's not like he was conjuring mystical secrets out of the aether, any more than, say, OpenAI is today. And that's about how his inventions were received: with surprise that such things were possible, followed by credulity and wild predictions over where it might go, mostly relayed by people who didn't understand the technology.

Electricity simply doesn't provide a practical mass destructive capacity in the way that, say, the strong nuclear force does. However, from the breakneck rate of electrical technology from the 1890s onwards, you could see why an extrapolation of those capabilities could make it plausible that it could eventually get there.

CRConrad2• 3 years ago

There's lots of doubt on that. I doubt it, for one, and probably lots of other people too. So where do you get this ridiculous “there's no doubt” from?!?

Until there is some proof that Tesla possesed an “advanced way to cause mass destruction” there is nothing but doubt about that.

thaumaturgy• 3 years ago

The energy of the Tunguska event is estimated at around 60,000,000,000 megajoules. Assuming no transmission losses whatsoever, this can only mean that Tesla built the world's first nuclear power plant and that it still dwarfs the output of all modern nuclear power plants today -- combined! He was truly a remarkable inventor.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 3 years ago

Actually you can reconcile this. Maybe Tesla’s transmitter acted like one of the laser targeting pods the military uses. The laser itself is minuscule energy, but it serves as guidance to a bomb or missile that is a lot more energetic. Maybe Tesla was in league with the aliens who wanted to test one of their missiles. Not wanting to cause a lot of casualties, they talked with Tesla about where they could target. Tesla used his device to help them target a very remote area of Siberia.

miles• 3 years ago

From "Tesla Wireless and the Tunguska Explosion"[0]:

"Tesla said his transmitter could produce 100 million volts of pressure and currents up to 1000 amperes, with experimental power levels of billion or tens of billions of watts.(18) If that amount of power were released in 'an incomparably small interval of time,'(19) the energy would be equal to the explosion of millions of tons of TNT, that is, a multi-megaton explosion. Such a transmitter would be capable of projecting the force of a nuclear warhead by radio."

"18. Tesla, Nikola, New York Times, 'How to Signal Mars,' May 23, 1909, pg. 10. He claims to have sent 'a current around the globe' on the order of '15,000,000' horsepower or 11 billion watts."

"19. Secor, H. Winfield, 'The Tesla High Frequency Oscillator,' The Electrical Experimenter, March 1916, pg. 615."

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20040203060110/http://www.frank....

JoeAltmaier3• 3 years ago

Or it somehow 'grounded' the entire ionosphere, producing the mother of all lightning discharges.

joshuahedlund• 3 years ago

Why would you double the line?

shellac• 3 years ago

Because you get right answer that way. Why would you want the wrong answer?

JoeAltmaier3• 3 years ago

Half-wave vs full-wave was a common error.

andrewl2• 3 years ago

A similar event in or near a populated area today might be interpreted as a nuclear attack.

remote_phone• 3 years ago

The entire world would have detected the meteor that large and been warned

andrewl2• 3 years ago

The Wikipedia page for the Tunguska event says it was “a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size.” How far out would something that size be detected? This is very much out of my area.

adastra22• 3 years ago

No, we routinely get hit by rocks we didn’t see coming.

JoeDaDude• 3 years ago

Detecting incoming asteroids, especially small ones, is really hard. The recent 1-meter meteor that exploded over Europe, was only the seventh instance of a successful detection.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2023/02/13/asteroid-expl...

retrac• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor

The Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over the southern Ural region in Russia on 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT (03:20 UTC). It was caused by an approximately 18 m (59 ft) diameter, 9,100-tonne (10,000-short-ton) near-Earth asteroid that entered the atmosphere at a shallow 18.3 ± 0.4 degree angle with a speed relative to Earth of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second (69,000 km/h; 42,690 mph).
[...] The asteroid had a total kinetic energy before atmospheric impact equivalent to the blast yield of 400–500 kilotons of TNT (about 1.4–1.8 PJ), estimated from infrasound and seismic measurements. This was 26 to 33 times as much energy as that released from the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima.

If it had been at a slightly sharper angle, or slightly larger, or moving slightly faster, and if it had hit the right location, it could have destroyed a city. Fortunately it disintegrated in the upper atmosphere, so it only blew out windows across a large area as it burned brighter than the sun across the sky.

There was no warning. The Tunguska rock, if it was a rock, was only a few times wider. I don't think we can reliably detect those, either.

slackdog2• 3 years ago

By lay-observers, probably. But probably not by the systems actually designed to detect nuclear explosions, because those systems can distinguish nuclear explosions from other sorts of very large explosions by looking for characteristic emissions signatures, like x-ray emissions and the double flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhangmeter

twelve40• 3 years ago

pretty sure the main focus is on detecting launches instead of explosions (detecting explosions doesn't help very much with holding up the end of the MAD bargain, so to speak)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-Based_Infrared_System

AlbertCory4• 3 years ago

We sought evidence that the little lake existed before the event. Reliable, pre-1908 maps of this uninhabited region of Siberia are not easy to come by, but we found a czarist military map from 1883 that fails to show the lake. Testimony by local Evenk natives also asserts that a lake was produced by the 1908 explosion.

this is about as suggestive a set of facts as you're ever likely to get. We don't need any exotic theories about Tesla or aliens.

The first step in preparing ourselves would be to decide whether the cosmic object that affected Siberia was an asteroid or a comet.

What would we do differently if we determined conclusively which it was? A comet could strike Earth, even if Tunguska was not one. Knowing that it happened doesn't make it any more likely it could happen again.

sandworm1013• 3 years ago

One is more common that the other. And size matters. The smaller this object was, the more likely it will be to happen again. So it's exact size and composition matters when calculating future likelihoods.

AlbertCory4• 3 years ago

well, it caused a city-killing explosion. What would we do differently if the projected size estimates varied by 10x?

It's scientifically interesting. Nothing wrong with that.

Gordonjcp• 3 years ago

What would we do differently if we determined conclusively which it was?

We probably *couldn't* do much differently, but Newton-for-Newton a bloody great big squashy snowball hitting us with a certain amount of energy would have a different effect - and maybe different mitigation - from a smaller harder rock with the same energy.

AlbertCory4• 3 years ago

We probably couldn't do much differently

and yet the DART experiment did succeed in changing the path of an asteroid.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

Comets, because they tell all the way down the gravity well from the kuiper belt, are faster than relatively stable orbit asteroids.

Kinetic energy is a square of velocity....

recuter• 3 years ago

I'll just leave this here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kulik

http://scihi.org/leonid-kulik-tunguska-event/

I_am_not_saying_it_was_aliens.gif

toss1• 3 years ago

Related: Sandia Labs did some impressive simulations of that event entering the atmosphere. A couple of the resulting videos; well worth a minute to watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yY34uWty_0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr7i33UhmC8

dang• 3 years ago

Related. Others?

A Tunguska size burst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, Bronze Age city in Jordan Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603118 - Sept 2021 (344 comments)

The Tunguska Event - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12061852 - July 2016 (119 comments)

The Tunguska Event - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155701 - Feb 2016 (71 comments)

Tunguska Event - a blast from the past [ Meteroite hit on Siberia 1908] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229807 - Feb 2013 (4 comments)

The Tunguska Event - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2314154 - March 2011 (1 comment)

The Siberian Blast (or the Tunguska event) Visualized in a Supercomputer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257373 - July 2008 (1 comment)

The Tunguska Mystery 100 Years Later (2008)

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