GodsThumb

When, on 30 June, 1908, a mysterious explosion flattened around half a million acres of forest near the Podkamennay Tunguska River in central Siberia, Russia, the blast could be heard up to 500 miles away and eyewitnesses reported seeing a shining object in the sky, moving toward the earth. What caused the explosion and why were particles of extra-terrestrial magnetite and silicate found in the soil and embedded in trees nearby? In the 1920s, Soviet scientist Leonid Kulik thought the cataclysm was due to a meteorite, but was puzzled that there was no crater or rock fragments around. His investigative myopia prevented him from understanding the secret cause of the explosion: a collision of a fragment of comet with the Earth. A comet, a “dirty snowball” comprised of ice and dust, had vaporized a few miles above the taiga, creating a fireball and ballistic wave. It weighed hundreds of thousands of tons and would have been traveling at around 60,000 miles per hour. The resulting explosion was equivalent to between 10 and 15 megatons of TNT, nearly 1,000 times more powerful than the first atomic bombs.