Approximately once a year, the mystery of the century - where the Tunguska meteorite got to and what exactly happened on the territory of present-day Evenkia on June 30, 1908 - is declared solved
But not a single gram of what actually consisted of a space body that exploded over the taiga at an altitude of several kilometers was never found. And I really want to do it.
Bagel treasures
Once in the place of the fall, I also tried to find the material of the meteorite together with one of the enthusiastic researchers. Volodya called himself a biolocation operator and probed the Tunguska subsoil. “There’s some kind of anomaly in the ground,” my search colleague explained. “I can feel it …” According to him, over the past decades, the rains washed away the meteorite matter from the heights, but in some places it survived below. This substance lies, one might say, on the surface, and the anomalous place itself is located between the small bog Bublik and Mount Ostroy, 4 kilometers west of the conventional point - the epicenter of the explosion.
We've mapped the boundaries of the anomaly. And before that, other researchers found diamond-graphite intergrowths of space origin and metal plates enriched with nickel and platinum in the peat of Bublik.
There, one day, I had to observe a phenomenon unusual for the taiga: in the late evening, a very low rumbling rumble came from above, from which the earth trembled and the ears were blocked. The participants of the Tungus scientific expeditions sitting by the fire jumped up - it seemed that another meteorite was falling. The hum intensified, became ringing, the object, indistinguishable behind the low clouds, passed over the swamp and began to recede. Soon we saw him: in the gap between the clouds, a bright red, flickering star appeared and disappeared behind the forest. In total, this anomalous flight lasted more than a minute.
Cemetery "witnesses"
Unusual sensations are experienced even when approaching the epicenter. Mi-8 lands in the crater of an ancient volcano, over which the explosion occurred. Crater, but not that one - coincidence. Or, on the contrary, not accidental, if we believe the hypothesis of the "Tunguska plasmoid". According to her, the area of the fall is a special place on Earth, an "antenna" or "channel", where energy flows from space into the interior of the planet and back. A piece of plasma in a magnetic bag detached from the Sun was attracted along this "antenna" to the volcano. Over the taiga, the plasma was discharged, so there is no substance either.
The so-called "catastrophic fall" - dead trees felled by a shock wave, still leaves a strong impression. I just admired the powerful larches, broken at a height of two or three meters, like matches. The wood on the fractures of the stumps seemed to be crushed by a giant press. Up close, the dump looks like a tree mutant graveyard. But the real mutants of Tunguska are ants and crustaceans in water bodies. After the catastrophe, for some reason, their legs and shells changed … Some of the scientists called the place of the fall "the garden of mutants" because of the abnormal growth of plants. For example, young pines in the epicenter grow much faster than usual. According to one hypothesis, the whole point is in the substance of the meteorite, which has become a kind of fertilizer for the Tunguska flora. And the inhabitants of the village of Strelka-Chunya on a tributary of the Nizhnyaya Tunguska were found to have a genetic anomaly - a mutation of a blood protein. The Evenks of three generations of one of the families in 1912 received a unique combination of the Rh factor, which is absent among the northern peoples. The genus of mutants came from the hunter, who was near the epicenter at the time of the explosion.
Promotional video:
Three features
Today, this one of a kind area of the planet is marked on the ground with shields announcing "Special Protected Zone". They were installed by the reserve inspectors. It would be more correct to write “Preserve. Protected by the state”or“Entry and hunting prohibited”. But someone liked the term "zone". This suggests an analogy with the well-known fantastic image from the story of the Strugatsky brothers "Roadside Picnic" and the film "Stalker": there the "zone" that arose at the landing site of an alien ship becomes a symbol of the unknown. It's the same on Tunguska. The scientific debate around the mystery of the century has long been at an impasse. Academician Nikolai Vasiliev, the leader of dozens of scientific expeditions to the crash site, expressed the painful problem best of all: “The choice between a comet nucleus, an iron and stone asteroid is a choice between a blue line, a green line and a speckled line. The Tunguska meteorite stubbornly does not climb into the Procrustean bed of classical ideas about small bodies of the Solar system. There is no "substance", it is unclear why, both before and after the fall, unusually bright nights were observed on a huge part of Eurasia, the testimony of eyewitnesses who observed the flight of the fireball, some in the morning, some in the afternoon, some in the evening, do not agree. There is also a hypothesis that all eyewitnesses are lying, no fireball existed, and the forest fell due to an explosion of bog gas.and the forest fell due to an explosion of swamp gas.and the forest fell due to an explosion of bog gas.
The situation becomes clearer if we assume that on Tunguska mankind is faced with a phenomenon that still does not really know anything about. In this we are not far from the Tungus, who were sure that 94 years ago the iron birds of Agdy with burning eyes descended from the sky and punished people. One of the researchers, after long ordeals, concluded: "We are pygmies who saw an airliner crash in the jungle." It's a shame for science, but it explains a lot.