The Tunguska catastrophe, which occurred in 1908 in Eastern Siberia, was not the result of the fall of a cosmic body, but an explosion of hydrogen and methane released from the mouth of an ancient volcano. Vladimir Natiaganov, associate professor of the Department of Gas Dynamics, Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, said this in an interview with RIA Novosti
Exactly 102 years ago, on June 30, 1908, in the basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, on the territory of present-day Evenkia, a fireball flew and exploded. In the area of the explosion, a forest was tumbled down on an area approximately equal to modern Moscow. The hypothesis was immediately put forward that the catastrophe was the result of a meteorite fall, but at the site of the explosion, no traces of the fall, nor debris of the cosmic body itself were found.
Currently, most scientists believe that the Tunguska space body is a stone meteorite that exploded and completely evaporated before reaching the ground. However, some researchers defend various geophysical hypotheses explaining the Tunguska event by terrestrial reasons.
Natiaganov and his colleagues, in an article accepted for publication in the journal "Doklady Akademii Nauk", described the mathematical model they created of the oblique impact of a cylindrical jet of liquid or gas on a plane. One of the unexpected results of using this model was the coincidence of the deformation spot predicted by this model with the shape of a forest fall at the site of the Tunguska disaster.
“This 'butterfly' (as the researchers call the shape of a spot of forest felling) could have arisen due to the explosive burning of a jet, or 'stocking', filled with hydrogen and methane released from the mouth of an ancient volcano. Moreover, the burning started from above, possibly as a result of a lightning strike,”Natiaganov said.
He added that attempts were made to experimentally and numerically simulate the shape of the fallout, but it was not possible to get the correct result.
According to Natiaganov, the hydrogen explosion hypothesis, in combination with the impact model proposed by him and his colleagues, makes it possible to obtain a "butterfly" quite accurately, as well as explain most of the other paradoxes of Tunguska.
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Natyaganov believes that the impact of a space body precisely at the point of catastrophe was extremely unlikely.
“The epicenter of the Tunguska event fell practically into the center of an ancient paleovolcano, which was discovered from space in the mid-1970s. This vent coincides with the local gravitational anomaly, the same zone is close to the global geomagnetic anomaly. In addition, it falls into the seven land-based hot spots of the planet, where lava comes close enough to the surface,”said the agency's source.
“The coincidence of all these four facts, with the fact that something flew and exploded over this four-fold anomalous point - we can calculate the conditional probability - this is less than one billion,” he said.
The scenario of the Tunguska catastrophe, supported by the scientist, is based on the hypothesis of a sharp increase in hydrogen degassing in the area of the mouth of the Kulikovo paleovolcano, followed by a high-altitude explosion of a giant hydrogen-methane jet and the propagation of a combustion or detonation wave along it.
"According to experimental data, a downward combustion wave is possible starting from 9% of the hydrogen content in the air," the researcher clarified.
The hydrogen explosion, in particular, explains the whitening of humus in the area of the catastrophe, as well as a number of contradictions in the traditional space hypothesis.