On the eve of the 112th anniversary of one of the most mysterious events of the 20th century, Italian scientists recalled their version of the solution.
On June 30, 1908, at about seven in the morning, the sky over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River suddenly shone dazzlingly! Witnesses claimed that a second sun was lit in the sky - brighter and hotter than the first. Then there was a terrible explosion, knocking down a century-old forest on an area of 2000 square kilometers. The sound wave circled the planet several times, white nights set in from Central Siberia to the Atlantic … According to scientists, the impact power was equal to the explosion of the first thousand atomic bombs.
This event went down in history under the name "Fall of the Tunguska meteorite". 112 years have passed, but during this time not one of the hundreds of expeditions was able to find a single debris of the space alien. The Italian professor Luca Gasperini, who works at the Bologna Institute of Marine Geology ISMAR and has been studying the Tunguska phenomenon for 20 years, spoke about his version of solving this mystery. He became a guest of the joint program of Radio Komsomolskaya Pravda and the Russian Geographical Society Club of Famous Travelers (97.2 FM).
THE BIRTH OF A LEGEND
Why are you interested in the topic of the Tunguska meteorite? It's so far from Italy …
- Yes, Tunguska, Russia, Siberia are really far away. A lucky chance helped. I was engaged in marine geophysics, and in 1999 my colleague Giuseppe Longo organized an expedition to study Lake Cheko, which is located eight kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion of the Tunguska space body. It was assumed that at its bottom, in the sedimentary layer of 1908, there may be fragments of a meteorite, which fell either from the sky or were carried along the Kimchu River.
As a result, a different version was born?
Promotional video:
- We came to the conclusion that Cheko is a crater from the fall of a part of the Tunguska meteorite. And this fragment must be looked for under water 10 meters below the bottom level. Other fragments of the meteorite in the taiga can no longer be found, for 100 years they have mixed with the earth's rocks.
3D model of the Cheko bottom - it has an unusual shape, more like a crater. At this point, probably, a fragment of a space alien is hiding. Photo: ISMAR.
Amid the silt at the bottom
- But even Soviet scientists argued that the lake is much older than 100 years, which means that it was formed before the meteorite fell
- This opinion is based on the conclusion of one of the famous researchers of the Tunguska phenomenon, Kirill Florensky. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was he who sent the divers to the bottom of Cheko, and when they returned with a heap of silt, he decided: since there are so many bottom sediments at the bottom, it means that the lake existed even before the meteorite fell.
But he did not take into account the fact that the Kimchu River, which flows into the lake, brings with it a lot of particles of organic matter and mud, creating significant silt deposits in a short time. On one of the expeditions, we drilled pits and came across an interesting moment: under a meter layer of silt there are completely different sedimentary rocks, which we called "Siberian porridge" - a mixture of earth, garbage and pieces of wood. Pollen from trees younger than one hundred years old was found in this "porridge". This means that the oldest layer of bottom sediments began to form at the very beginning of the 20th century when the Kimchu crater was filled with water, which was formed from the impact and subsequent melting of the permafrost.
There are exact coordinates …
- And, finally, the third interesting point. Back in 1999, using sonars and an echo sounder, we compiled a volumetric 3D map of the Cheko bottom relief (see photo). As a rule, lakes in Siberia are not very deep and have a flat bottom, as they were scraped out by a glacier, like a colossal bulldozer, during the last global glaciation. But Cheko has an original shape of the bottom - conical, with an unusual depth of 50 meters at the tip of the cone. This does not fit the traditional model of local soil erosion processes. But within the framework of the model of the formation of a meteorite crater - quite!
In addition, we did not find a single map until 1908 that marked this lake. And not a single mention in the documents.
Professor Luca Gasperini. Photo: ISMAR.
How to find the final evidence of the finding at the bottom of Cheko a fragment of the Tunguska meteorite?
- It is enough to drill in the center of the lake, in a place that has precise coordinates. It will not cost so much, but now only Russian scientists can do this project, they have much more financial and organizational capabilities. And we are ready to help as experts.
Eyewitness testimony
It got so hot, like a shirt on fire
From the story of Semyon Semyonov, who was 70 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion:
“Suddenly in the north the sky split in two, and a fire appeared in it, wide and high above the forest, which engulfed the entire northern part of the sky. At that moment, I felt so hot, as if my shirt was on fire …
The sky slammed shut and there was a violent blow. I was thrown from the porch by three fathoms … there was such a knock, as if stones were falling from the sky or cannons were firing, the earth was trembling …
Many of the glass in the windows were broken, and the iron tab for the door lock was broken at the barn."
An Italian expedition in 1999 explores the lake on a catamaran named after the Russian discoverer of the Tunguska phenomenon, Leonid Kulik. Photo: ISMAR.
QUOTE IN THE TOPIC
In 1960, one of the famous scientists who were looking for the Tunguska meteorite, Boris Vronsky, wrote a poem dedicated to divers who examined the bottom of a mysterious lake: