(Trees knocked over by the Tunguska blast. Photograph from Kulik's 1927 expedition.)WHAT HAPPENED?
Experts do not know why incidents with meteorites have become so frequent nowadays. One of the versions says that someone in deep black space deliberately bombards the Earth with meteorites.
The Tunguska Event, or Tunguska explosion, was a massive explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, at around 7:14 a.m. (0:14 UT, 7:02 a.m. local solar time) on June 30, 1908(June 17 in the Julian calendar, in use locally at the time).
Although the cause is the subject of some debate, the explosion was most likely caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10kilometres (3–6 miles) above Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded varying estimates for the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across.
Although the meteor or comet burst in the air rather than directly hitting the surface, this event is still referred to as an impact. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 megatons to as high as 30 megatons[5] of TNT, with 10–15 megatons the most likely - roughly equal to the United States' Castle Bravo thermonuclear explosion set off in late February of 1954, about 1000 times more powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan and about one third the power of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. The explosion knocked over an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometres (830 square miles).
It is estimated that the earthquake from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale, which was not yet developed at the time. An explosion of this magnitude is capable of destroying a large metropolitan area. This possibility has helped to spark discussion of asteroid deflection strategies.
Although the Tunguska event is believed to be the largest impact event on land in Earth's recent history, impacts of similar size in remote ocean areas would have gone unnoticed before the advent of global satellite monitoring in the 1960s and 1970s.Read more about this right here.
WHAT HIT EARTH?
One hundred years ago this week, natives of a rural, hilly area northwest of Lake Baikal witnessed what seemed to be the end of the world. Amid loud thunder, "the sky split" into a wall of fire as people were knocked off their feet, scorched by heat that felt, according to one description, "as though my shirt was on fire." They were lucky: for instead of obliterating a metropolis, the meteorite that scientists believe caused the now-famous Tunguska Event landed in barren land in southern Siberia. The explosion left behind a burned-out moon-scape the size of Tokyo.
But the absence of a crater at the site, has scientists puzzling to this day about the true nature of the blast. You can read the full details right here.
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