New Paper Has a Wild Explanation For The Most Explosive 'Meteor Impact' on Record

Photo credit: Leonard Kulik Expedition/Wikimedia Commons

Michelle Starr writes for SpaceAlert.com": In the early morning of 30 June 1908, something exploded over Siberia. The event shattered the normal stillness of the sparsely populated taiga, so powerful that it flattened an area of forest 2,150 square kilometers (830 square miles) in size - felling an estimated 80 million trees.

…The Tunguska event - as it came to be known - was later characterized as an exploding meteor, or bolide, up to 30 megatons, at an altitude of 10 to 15 kilometers (6.2 to 9.3 miles).

It is often referred to as the "largest impact event in recorded history", even though no impact crater was found. Later searches have turned up fragments of rock that could be meteoric in origin, but the event still has a looming question mark. Was it really a bolide? And if it wasn't, what could it be? Read More