Until now, scientists do not understand what kind of strange explosion happened on June 30, 1908 in the Siberian taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River
Our correspondent visited the epicenter of the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite near the Evenk village of Vanavara - now it is the territory of the Tunguska nature reserve. The guides and workers of the reserve said that they themselves did not believe in the fall of the meteorite. Since many expeditions have already been here over a hundred years, no one has yet found a single fragment of the meteorite.
Or maybe it's not a meteorite?
On the very first evening at the "Pristan" - the legendary base of the first explorer of the Tunguska meteorite Leonid Kulik - an argument flared up, as they explained to me, which has been going on among the reserve workers for several years.
“You can argue for a long time on the topic that in our deaf
to find a fragment of a meteorite in the taiga is like a needle in a haystack,”Sergei TARASOV, the oldest employee of the Tunguska Gas Processing Plant, told me. - But we have been wandering in these places for several years, I can tell you about any corner of the reserve as a keepsake. There is no trace here. And all the numerous expeditions … well, people want to go out into nature, especially since often all these trips take place at public expense. The Italians recently announced that the Tunguska meteorite lies at the bottom of Lake Cheko (a small body of water on the territory of the reserve. - AM). Like, it was formed just from its fall. Now they say that half a million euros are needed to organize the drilling of the seabed. And I can say without any drilling that there is nothing there. After all, the banks of the Cheko are overgrown with trees that are much more than a hundred years old. If a meteorite fell there, they would be blown away by a blast wave."
As a result, all those present were divided into two camps. One party defended the version that the legendary explosion is a manifestation of some natural anomalies that have nothing to do with space: for example, the explosion of a methane cloud that seeped through the permafrost. Other aborigines, oddly enough, were inclined to the option that the catastrophe in the taiga was due to the experiments of Nikola Tesla.
"Electricity mage" has nothing to do with it
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Strange, but this dispute between simple and not very educated villagers was surprisingly similar to the one that scientists in Moscow indulged in last week.
“Yes, we took the liberty to include in the program reports on the possible involvement of Nikola Tesla in what happened on June 30, 1908,” says the deputy chairman of the organizing committee of the conference “100 years of the Tunguska phenomenon. New Approaches”, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Andrey OLKHOVATOV. - It is known that the "magician of electricity" Tesla, who lived in the United States at that time, experimented a lot with wireless transmission of electricity over long distances. There are descriptions of his experiments, when the thunderstorm discharges escaping from Tesla's laboratory reached 5 meters in length, and the thunder accompanying them was heard at a distance of up to 25 kilometers. This is how the legend appeared that the explosion in the taiga was the result of one of his unsuccessful experiments.
It seems that in the spring of 1908 Tesla, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, stated: “… Even now, my wireless power plants can turn any area of the world into an area uninhabitable …” Perhaps at the end of June the inventor simply demonstrated his capabilities to someone Which of the potential customers? Indeed, on the night of June 30, many observers in Canada and Northern Europe noticed clouds of an unusual silvery color in the sky, which seemed to be pulsing. This coincides with eyewitness accounts of Tesla's experiments in his laboratory in Colorado Springs.
- Although I myself have great doubts about this version, - adds Olkhovatov, - nevertheless Nikola Tesla is a mysterious figure surrounded by many secrets, therefore this report was accepted into the conference program.
Scientists in Moscow also discussed the possibility that the causes of the catastrophe should be looked for underground.
“There is such a thing as“earthquake fires”- a strange glow that sometimes appears in seismically active regions,” continues Andrey Olkhovatov. - They can take on a wide variety of forms, including flying fireballs. And they sometimes explode, resembling ball lightning. These phenomena have been studied very poorly. Perhaps they were observed by the inhabitants of the taiga on June 30, 1908. By the way, a similar case occurred during the earthquake on February 14, 2003 near the city of Tyukalinsk, Omsk region. Similar fires were then mistaken for the fall of a large meteorite. A 100-year-old catastrophe also occurred during a period of increased seismic activity in the region. So the Tunguska meteorite could “fly” not from the sky, but from underground.
Comet or asteroid?
The involvement of the great Serbian inventor in the events of 1908 was also discussed on the sidelines of another conference that ended last week, "100 years of the Tunguska phenomenon: past, present and future." But not too serious.
“There are more than a hundred versions of what happened,” says Sergey YAZEV, a senior researcher at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the SB RAS, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. - But not all of them are equal. For example, I would not seriously argue that the explosion over Tunguska was made by physicist Nikola Tesla. The fact is that a bright fireball, which was seen by thousands of eyewitnesses on the morning of June 30, 1908, flew not from America to Siberia across the pole, as it would have been if this great inventor had arranged it, but in the opposite direction - from the north of Baikal to the north -west! All in all, there are, in fact, two main versions in the scientific community. Undoubtedly, a cosmic body fell, but which one? Either an icy comet nucleus or a rocky asteroid.
Most experts are inclined towards the cometary variant, since it explains why there are no fragments of meteorite matter in the explosion area. After all, if the Tunguska body consisted of ice, frozen water, it is easy to explain where almost one and a half million tons of the arrived substance went: it simply turned into hot steam during the explosion.
However, at the conference a report by scientists from the Institute of Dynamics of Geospheres of the Russian Academy of Sciences was presented, refuting this theory. They made calculations according to which the Tunguska body could still be an asteroid. But it scattered into fine dust, moving at high speed in the Earth's atmosphere. That is why it was not possible to find debris and fragments …
Most of the meteorites are still skeptical about this hypothesis. It is difficult to imagine that ALL matter turned into dust without exception. At least small fragments should have remained, and they would have already been found - after all, they were looking very carefully …
- There is still no complete unanimity, - Sergey Yazev shrugs. - The comet version also has its drawbacks. In addition, scientists sometimes disagree on what comets are. It was long believed that this is an ancient building material left over from the formation of the planets of the solar system. But at the conference a very interesting hypothesis was voiced by an employee of the Physico-Technical Institute. Ioffe Eduard Drobyshevsky. He believes that comets are debris from exploding ice shells of Jupiter's moons - for example, Io or Europa. Then the Tunguska meteorite is such a fragment, while Drobyshevsky explains the gigantic power of the Tunguska explosion by the fact that a chemical explosion occurred in the atmosphere - the explosive mixture added energy. In the future, the researcher says, the crust of the Callisto satellite may explode - and then fragmentslike the Tunguska, will fall to Earth every three days!
The Italian professor Giuseppe Longo (the son of Luigi Longo, a well-known figure of the Italian Communist Party of the Soviet Union) also came up with an original idea. A proponent of the asteroid version hopes to find the meteorite itself during excavations at the small and strange Lake Cheko near the epicenter of the explosion. The lake has an unusual conical shape.
Longo speaks excellent Russian. “If I were the Russian authorities, I would say: okay, let these Italians drill a well on Cheko. But Russia itself must allocate funds and find the Russian meteorite itself! Why are they not trying to do this in the country? However, so far the Italian team has similar problems. It takes half a million euros to drill the bottom of Lake Cheko, but we don't have them yet …"
Alas, no major breakthroughs in the study of the Tunguska phenomenon have been made for the anniversary.
This was summed up by the prominent Russian geochemist, expert in the physics of explosions, Academician of the RAS Vitaly ADUSHKIN:
- Now, as well as a hundred years ago, in the scientific community no one has a clear idea of what happened on June 30, 1908 in Siberia. There is not a single hypothesis that would satisfy all the available facts. We don't know what it was …
WHAT'S NEXT
They will try to search for a meteorite with georadars
Lyudmila LOGUNOVA, Director of the Tunguska Gas Processing Plant:
- In the capital's Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IZMIRAN), unique georadars have been created that can literally shine through the earth to a depth of 100 meters. Last year they were successfully tested on the Elbrus glaciers. We turned to IZMIRAN with a request to use these instruments to study several sites in the area of the epicenter of the disaster in order to detect large fragments of the meteorite. Perhaps we will carry out these studies next year.
BTW
What can be found at Lake Cheko
Italian scientists, who were present in Moscow at the conference "100 years of the Tunguska phenomenon", proposed to look for fragments of a meteorite eight kilometers from the "official" epicenter. In the local flowing lake Cheko. The Italians used sonar to survey the Cheko bottom in 1999. The results have now been processed. It turned out that its bottom has a conical shape. This is typical for lakes that appear in meteorite craters, and does not agree well with the version according to which Cheko is of karst origin. It was here, the Italians say, that a fragment of the Tunguska meteorite, weighing about 15 thousand tons, fell on the place of the lake (and the total “heavenly guest”, according to scientists, weighed about 100 thousand tons).
SPECIALIST OPINION
Member of several expeditions to the supposed area of the meteorite fall, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences Andrey OLKHOVATOV:
- The message of the Italians looks very convincing, if you do not know that in 1960-1961 the most ambitious expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences - more than 70 specialists - was looking for traces of the Tunguska meteorite in the same places. One of the points of the program was a survey by divers of the bottom of Lake Cheko and a search for meteorite matter in its vicinity. Our divers found that the bottom of the reservoir is conical, but no traces of a meteorite could be found.