The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball
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THE MYSTERY OF THE TUNGUSKA FIREBALL SURENDRA VERMA THE TUNGUSKA FIREBALL THE TUNGUSKA FIREBALL Solving One of the Great Mysteries of the 20th Century SURENDRA VERMA ICON BOOKS Published in the UK in 2005 by Icon Books Ltd, The Old Dairy, Brook Road, Thriplow, Cambridge SG8 7RG e-mail: [email protected] www.iconbooks.co.uk Sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by Faber and Faber Ltd, 3 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AU or their agents Distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia by TBS Ltd, Frating Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW Published in Australia in 2005 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065 Distributed in Canada by Penguin Books Canada, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Suite 300, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2 ISBN 1 84046 620 0 Text copyright © 2005 Surendra Verma The author has asserted his moral rights No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher Typesetting by Hands Fotoset Printed and bound in the UK by Clays of Bungay CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii INTRODUCTION ix CHAPTER ONE: FIRE IN THE SKY 1 CHAPTER TWO: THE CASE OF A MISSING METEORITE 19 CHAPTER THREE: THE TALE OF A FIERY COMET 57 CHAPTER FOUR: ASTEROIDS BEHAVING BADLY 79 CHAPTER FIVE: TRACELESS TUNGUSKA 105 CHAPTER SIX: THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY OF A BLACK HOLE 122 CHAPTER SEVEN: THE MATTER IN QUESTION 134 CHAPTER EIGHT: A BLAST FROM BELOW 154 CHAPTER NINE: OPENING THE X-FILES 173 CHAPTER TEN: A FIREBALL IN THE DINOSAURS’ SKY 202 CHAPTER ELEVEN: WHODUNIT? 240 TIMELINE: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF AN ENIGMA 251 SOURCES AND FURTHER READING 258 INDEX 267 v Surendra Verma is a science writer based in Melbourne, Australia since 1970. He has published several books and numerous articles, besides churning out pretentious prose for corporate and government publications. His Little Book of Scientific Principles, Theories and Things will be published in 2005 by New Holland. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the writing of this book, I requested the major proponents of two leading theories on the Tunguska event, Dr Zdenek Sekanina of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and Dr Vitalii Bronshten of the Committee of Meteorites of the Russian Academy of Sciences, to express their latest views on their theories. I was saddened to hear of Dr Bronshten’s death a few weeks after I had written to him. I’m grateful to Dr Sekanina for his response. I’m also grateful to Dr Robert Foot of the University of Melbourne; Professor Wolfgang Kundt of the University of Bonn; and Dr Kiril Chukanov of Chukanov Quantum Energy in Salt Lake City, Utah, for commenting on their research on the Tunguska event. My special thanks go to Dr Marek Zbik of the Ian Wark Research Institute at the University of South Australia for his help in providing research papers and illustrations; to Mr Vitalii Romeiko of Moscow for giving permission to use his photograph of the Suslov crater; to the staff of the State Library of Victoria for their courteous help on numerous occasions; to Geoff vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Coleman, Simon Kwok, Ruth Learner, Darren Lewin- Hill and Arun Tomar for their moral support; and to Eric (‘Fizzle’) Fiesley and Colin (‘Stick’) Storer for being true Aussie mates for more than 30 years. The writing of this book became a pleasure with Dr Andrei Ol’khovatov’s enthusiastic support in many ways. Dr Ol’khovatov, formerly of the Soviet Radio Instrument Industry Research Institute and now an independent researcher in Moscow, is a well-known personality in the Tunguska cyberspace and research communities. Thank you, Andrei. Keep the Tunguska fireball burning brightly. I’m indebted to Icon Books’ publisher Simon Flynn for giving me the opportunity to write this book, and their editor Duncan Heath for his indispensable advice. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Suman and my sons Rohit and Anuraag for their unfailing support throughout the writing of this book. viii INTRODUCTION The so-called Tunguska event has been part of the folk- lore of science since 1927, when Leonid Kulik became the first scientist to visit the explosion site. He saw an oval plateau 70 kilometres wide where the forest had been flattened. Trees were not uprooted: instead they were stripped of their branches, snapped off and scattered like matchsticks pointing away from the direction of the blast. Even after a careful search Kulik found no crater or other evidence of impact. He searched for meteorite fragments but found nothing. As there was no impact crater and no substantial remnants, a giant meteorite could not have caused the Tunguska explosion. If it were not a meteorite, then what caused the explosion? The search for the answer to this question has gener- ated a Tunguska industry that has kept both scientists and charlatans busy for eight decades. Hundreds of research articles in renowned and not- so-renowned journals prove that bright scientific minds are keen to solve the riddle. Tunguska also provides them with an opportunity to test-drive new theories: black holes, ball lightning, anti-matter and mirror matter ix INTRODUCTION are some of the examples. Astronomers’ recent fasci- nation with the probability of a rogue asteroid striking Earth has also refocused scientific attention on Tunguska. Adventurous ones can always make a trip to Tunguska and look for the evidence for ‘stones from the heavens’. There are workshops, symposia and conferences for the non-adventurous ones. Numerous websites, conspiracy theories, sensational TV documentaries, one episode of the popular TV series The X-Files, and so on prove that Tunguska adds enough exotic spices to make science palatable. For science fiction fans, Tunguska has boundless skies for spaceships to roam. Whichever way you look, Tunguska is a fascinating journey in serious science, speculative science and science fiction. The Tunguska Fireball attempts to give you a glimpse of that journey. A note on units and terms Metric units are used in this book. Even if you are not familiar with them, this should not diminish your enjoy- ment of reading or your understanding of the subject matter. You may assume metres to be yards, kilometres miles, Celsius Fahrenheit and tonnes tons, although values used are accurate. The energy unit ‘megaton’ is explained on its first appearance in the text. The term ‘theory’ is used in a general sense and includes terms such as ‘hypothesis’ and ‘model’. x CHAPTER ONE FIRE IN THE SKY About 7.14 a.m., 30 June 1908. The Central Siberian Plateau near the Stony Tunguska River, a remote and empty wilderness of swamps, bogs and hilly pine and cedar forests. Not a soul in sight for scores of kilometres. The eerie silence is punctuated by the shuffle of the hoofs of reindeer grazing in the morning sun and the hum of dense swarms of ferocious mosquitoes appropriately called ‘flying alligators’. Suddenly a blindingly bright pillar of fire, the size of a tall office building, races across the clear blue sky. The dazzling fireball moves within a few seconds from the south-southeast to the north-northwest, leaving a thick trail of light some 800 kilometres long. It descends slowly for a few minutes and then explodes about 8 kilometres above the ground. The explosion lasts only a few seconds but it is so powerful that it can be compared only with an atomic bomb – 1,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs. The explosion flattens 2,150 square kilometres of the mighty taiga, stripping millions of ancient trees of leaves and branches, leaving them bare like telegraph poles and scattering them like matchsticks. A dark mushroom cloud of dust rises to a height of 80 kilometres over the area after the explosion. A black rain of debris and dirt 1 THE TUNGUSKA FIREBALL follows. Shortly afterwards, bluish clouds of ice-coated dust grains are seen against the red sky. At Vanavara, a trading station about 70 kilometres from the explosion site, a trader, S.B. Semenov, sitting outside his house is knocked off his chair by violent shock waves. The explosion emits so much heat that it seems to be burning his shirt. He said later that he had only a moment to note the size of the bright blue ‘tube’ that covered an enormous part of the sky. ‘Afterwards it became dark and at the same time I felt an explosion that threw me several feet from the porch and for a moment I lost consciousness.’ He regains consciousness to hear a tremendous sound that shakes the whole house and nearly moves it off its foundation, breaks the glass in the windows and damages his barn considerably. The earth trembles and then the sky splits apart and a hot wind, as from a cannon, blows past the houses. Another trader, P.P. Kosolopov, who is walking out- side his house, feels his ears burning. He covers them with his hands and runs into his house. Inside the house, earth starts falling from the ceiling and the door of his large stove blows out. The window panes break and he hears thunder disappearing to the north. When it is quieter he goes into the yard but sees nothing else. Several kilometres north of Vanavara, the tents of dozens of nomads and herdsmen, including the occu- pants, are blown up into the air by the shock waves that follow the explosion. They all suffer slight bruises when they fall back to the ground. An elderly man hits a tree and breaks his arm. Another elderly man dies of fright.