Tunguska meteoroid turns 100 years old. Part 2

Final Installment. See the first installment in KP's June 30 issue Читайте: 100 лет Тунгусскому метеориту: Загадки, которые отгадать никто не может. Часть 2-я

A KP journalist visited the epicenter of the explosion of the Tunguska meteoroid near Vanavara village. Today, the territory is home to the Tunguska State Preserve. Employees and guides say they don't believe a meteoroid actually fell. Numerous expeditions to the area over the past 100 years haven't revealed a single fragment of the cosmic body.

Maybe it wasn't a meteoroid?

An age-old argument continued our first night at "The Harbor." The base had been established by the Tunguska researcher Leonid Kulik 100 years ago. I was told that the debate had been going on for years.

"One can say that finding a fragment in the taiga is the same as a needle in a haystack," said Sergey Tarasov, a senior employee at the preserve. "But this isn't our first year here. We're sure there are no fragments of the meteoroid in the taiga. And in terms of all these expeditions... Well, people just want to travel into the wilderness and all the trips are paid for by the treasury. Not too long ago, Italian researchers said the meteoroid is at the bottom of Cheko Lake. They say half a million euro is needed to the drill the lake. But I can tell you without doing any drilling that there's nothing there. Look the shore is covered with trees. Some are over 100 years old. If the meteoroid had fallen by the lake, the blast wave would have torn them right down."

So it seemed everyone was basically split into two camps. One side believed the legendary explosion was natural phenomena unrelated to the cosmos like an explosion of a methane cloud. The other side said the taiga catastrophe was in fact the result of experiments conducted by the electrical wizard Nikola Tesla.

Electrical wizard

Interestingly, Moscow's scientists joined the debate last week. They were unlikely participants in the heated debated of Vanavara's hunters and fisherman.

"We did in fact accept the conjectures that Nikola Tesla may have been party to the incident on June 30, 1908," said Andrey Alkhovatov, deputy chairman of the "100 Years of the Tunguska Phenomenon. New Approaches" Conference's Organizational Committee and candidate of Mathematical Sciences. It's well known that the electrical wizard Tesla, who lived in the U.S. at the time, made a number of experiments transmitting electric energy wirelessly across long distances. There are descriptions of his experiments where the thunderous discharges from his laboratory stretched over 5 meters and the accompanying thunder was heard for 25 kilometers. And so the legend was born that the taiga explosion was the result of one of his unfortunate experiments."

It seems Tesla wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1908 stating: "Even now, my wireless energetic facilities can turn any region on Earth into an area unfit for life." Maybe Tesla demonstrated his machine to a potential buyer in late June? Many witnesses claimed to have seen pulsating, strangely silver clouds in Canada and North America that night. Their accounts are similar to those who saw Tesla's experiments at his Colorado Springs laboratory.

"Although I have enormous doubt about this version," said Olkhovatov, "Nikola Tesla was indeed a mysterious figure. So we accepted this version at the conference."

The scientists also discussed the possibility that underground phenomena caused the catastrophe.

"There is a certain phenomenon known as an 'earthquake fire,'" said Olkhovatov. "It is a strange glowing that gives way in seismically active regions. It can also take on various forms, including flying balls of fire. Taiga inhabitants saw them June 30, 1908. And the 100-year-old catastrophe occurred during a period of increased seismic activity. So the Tunguska meteoroid may have actually 'flown' from underground and not from the sky."

Comet or asteroid?

Behind the scenes, participants at another conference last week, "100 Years of the Tunguska Phenomenon: Past, Present and Future," talked about Tesla's involvement in the 1908 event.

"There are over 100 versions about what happened," said Sergey Yazev, senior scientist at the Sun and Earth Physics Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences and candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. "But we don't way them all the same. For instance, I wouldn't take seriously the version that physicist Nikola Tesla made the explosion. The bright ball of fire that was seen June 30, 1908 by thousands of witnesses didn't fly from the U.S. to Siberia through the North Pole, as would have been the case if the magnificent inventor had been involved, but rather the other way around — from the north of Baykal to the northwest. There are essentially only two main versions in the scientific community. A cosmic body fell for sure. And it was either a comet's icy nucleus or a stone asteroid."

Most specialists believe a comet's nucleus crashed into the taiga. This explains why no fragments were found. If the Tunguska body was made of ice, it's easy to explain what happened to the half million tons that fell from the sky. They simply turned into steam after the explosion.

However, scientists from the Institute of Geological Dynamics at the Russian Academy of Sciences presented a report negating this theory. They believe the Tunguska body may have been an asteroid that burst into dust while passing through the Earth's atmosphere.

However, some scientists find this version hard to believe. How could the entire asteroid have turned into dust, they ask? Small fragments would have remained, and they would have been found already as the area has been combed over time and time again.

"No one is agreeing on anything," Yazev said, shrugging his shoulders. "The comet version certainly has its shortages."

Another interesting theory was presented and gained support at the conference. The comet was fractured ice from one of Jupiter's satellites. The power of the explosion was the result of a chemical reaction in the atmosphere. To put the theory into perspective, if Callisto's core exploded, fragments similar to Tunguska would hit the Earth every 3 days.

Italian Professor Djuzepppe Longo hopes to find the meteoroid in the small Cheko Lake near the epicenter of the explosion. He notes the lake has an unusual form. Longo spoke to his colleagues in Moscow in superb Russian.

"If I was in the place of the Russian authorities, I'd say: 'Okay, well, let the Italians do the drilling at Cheko. But Russia has to allocate money and find the Russian meteoroid itself. Why aren't they trying to do so? Our Italian team is having similar problems. We need 500,000 euro to drill at the lake, but we don't have the necessary funds."

Unfortunately, no breakthroughs were made in researching the Tunguska phenomenon during the anniversary of the event.

"Today, just like 100 years ago, no one in the scientific community knows exactly what happened in Siberia on June 30, 1908..." said Vitaliy Adushkin, a geochemist, specialist in physical explosions and colleague at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Читайте: 100 лет Тунгусскому метеориту: Загадки, которые отгадать никто не может. Часть 2-я

The author is waiting for your feedback on our site. Leave a comment!