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I've always been interested in books dealing with some of the great mysteries of the world. One such is the Tunguska event of 1908 when an object exploded over the Central Siberian Plateau near the Tunguska River "a remote and empty wilderness of swamps, bogs and hilly pine and cedar forests." The explosion flattened 2150 square kilometres of the Taiga forest. Fortunately, the area is largely uninhabited so few if any fatalities occurred. Vanavara, a small trading station, was 70 km from the site and a trader sitting outside his house was knocked off his chair. "He had only a moment to note the size of the bright blue 'tube' that covered an enormous part of the sky". Reverberations were registered around he world and " bright, colourful and prolonged dusks" occurred in the northern hemisphere.
Astonishingly, no expedition visited the site until 1927 when Leonid Kulik, a Russian mineralogist, undertook the journey through very difficult terrain. He expected to find the crater of a gigantic meteorite. None was found. So what was the object that exploded with such devastating force?
That is the subject of The Mystery of The Tunguska Fireball by Surendra Verma. This book provides a very interesting overview of the mysterious Tunguska event. The event itself is thoroughly described and the various attempts to explain it are summarized with considerable time devoted to the necessary information (always quite interesting) to help the reader understand the scientific background of each. The final chapter gives an excellent and fair summary of the present state of knowledge and evaluates even some of the really bizarre explanations. A russian website asked its visitors to answer the question "What do you think the Tunguska object was?" They were limited to one theory. The results were:
A comet 31%
A Meteorite/asteroid 27%
An alien spaceship 9%
Other 33%
While the comet theory held the field for some time, Scientists have now largely rejected it and the rogue asteroid theory is the dominant opinion. And it is only an opinion as no explanation actually seems to cover all the events that occurred as a result of the cataclysm.
Other theories include:
A mini black hole that passed through the earth
An anti-matter rock that annihilated itself
a mirror matter rock that nobody could see
A Volcanic blow-out
A giant lightning ball that materialised from nowhere
An explosion from some unknown subterranean and atmospheric processes
A plasmoid surrounded by a strong magnetic field
A zap from an alien laser
An experiment of a death ray invented by Nikola Tesler
Published in 2013, The Mystery of The Tunguska Fireball includes some recent similar events which have occurred in Siberia. It is a fascinating read.
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