Tunguska meteorite. Tunguska explosion

The mystery of the Tunguska meteorite

On June 30, 1908, a mysterious object exploded in the earth's atmosphere, later called the Tunguska meteorite.

On the early summer morning of June 30, 1908, in the depths of Russian Siberia, a phenomenon took place that later became known as.

Strange events preceded the disaster. Since June 21, 1908 - another 9 days before - in many places in Europe and Western Siberia the sky was full of bright colored dawns. White nights for several days ceased to be a monopoly of the northerners. In the twilight sky, strange long silvery clouds, stretched from east to west, glowed brightly. Since June 27, the number of such sightings has been rapidly increasing. At the same time, unusually frequent appearances of bright meteors were noted.

On June 30, at 7 a.m. local time, a monstrous explosion occurred in the Podkamennaya Tunguska river basin, 65 km north of the Vanavara trading post, in the remote Siberian taiga. Millions of centuries-old trees at a distance of up to 45 km from the site of the disaster were uprooted and thrown to the ground, hellish heat engulfed the earth for several moments, dry moss and dead wood caught fire. The sounds of the explosion were heard at a distance of up to 1200 km from the explosion site, ground shaking was felt up to 1000 km, glass in the windows of houses was broken 200-300 km away. The air wave of the Tunguska explosion circled the globe and was recorded by many weather stations around the world. All this was preceded by the flight of a large and unusually bright fireball, which was observed by thousands of residents of the Krasnoyarsk Territory at a distance of up to 400 km east of the explosion site. On this day early morning over the territory. The sound of thunder could be heard for almost a thousand kilometers around. The flight of the space alien ended with a grand explosion over the deserted taiga at an altitude of about 5 - 10 km, followed by a complete collapse of the taiga in the area between the Kimchu and Khushmo rivers - tributaries of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, 65 km from the village of Vanavara (Evenkia). The inhabitants of Vanavara and those few Evenki nomads who were in the taiga became living witnesses to the cosmic catastrophe.
Due to the powerful light flash Tunguska explosion and a stream of hot gases, a forest fire arose, completing the devastation of the area. In a vast space bounded from the east by the Yenisei, from the south by the line “Tashkent – Stavropol – Sevastopol – northern Italy – Bordeaux”, from the west – by the Atlantic coast of Europe, light phenomena of unprecedented scale and completely unusual events unfolded, which went down in history as “light nights of the summer of 1908". The clouds formed at an altitude of about 80 km intensely reflected Sun rays, thereby creating the effect of bright nights even where they had not been observed before. Throughout this gigantic territory, on the evening of June 30, night practically did not fall: the entire sky was glowing (it was possible to read a newspaper at midnight without artificial lighting). This phenomenon continued for several nights.
Within a few days after Tunguska explosion the whole of Europe was amazed by the extraordinary brightness and color of the morning and evening dawns, the strong glow of the night sky, allowing even the deepest night to read and photograph in the open air. The birds could not settle down for the night, losing track of days and nights. Individual manifestations of these anomalies were observed for a whole month after the disaster.
for many years turned the rich taiga into a cemetery of dead forest. A study of the consequences of the disaster showed that the explosion energy was 10 - 40 megatons of TNT equivalent, which is comparable to the energy of two thousand simultaneously detonated nuclear bombs, similar to the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Later, increased tree growth was discovered at the center of the explosion, indicating a radiation release.

In the history of mankind, in terms of the scale of observed phenomena, it is difficult to find a more grandiose and mysterious event than. The first studies of this phenomenon began already under Soviet power: in 1927-39 of the last century, to the crash site Tunguska meteorite Four expeditions were sent, organized by the USSR Academy of Sciences. They were led by a specialist in mineralogy and meteorite research, Leonid Alekseevich Kulik.
The participants of Kulik’s first expedition saw a grandiose picture of destruction. The cemetery of centuries-old taiga giants stretched like a continuous flooring for many kilometers. The “needles” of bare trees, stripped by the explosion and in places burned in places, but remaining on the roots, pierced the sky gloomily. Getting lost in the remote Siberian taiga is a trivial matter. Here it was simply impossible: all the fallen trees had their roots facing almost the same place.
It was here, in the very center of the disaster, that it would seem that it was necessary to look for traces of the formidable space alien. But three expeditions in a row - several years of hard, dramatic work do not bring success: the remains Tunguska meteorite was not found.
Only in 1938, before the fourth expedition, an incomplete aerial photograph of the forest fall and the central part of the disaster area was carried out, which immediately gave interesting results.
Science fiction writer Alexander Petrovich Kazantsev in 1946 proposed the version that this was an interplanetary ship from another planet that experienced an explosion as a result of an accident nuclear reactor above the ground itself. The reasoning that led Kazantsev to this idea was based on a common sense idea: the standing forest at the epicenter of the disaster could only be explained on the assumption that the explosion occurred not on the ground, but in the air.

American physicists Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan stated that the Earth encountered a “black hole”; some researchers have suggested that it was fantastic laser ray or a piece of plasma torn away from the Sun; French astronomer and researcher of optical anomalies Felix de Roy suggested that on June 30 the Earth probably collided with a cloud of cosmic dust.

Since 1959, the Tunguska taiga has become a place of persistent searches. The search for radioactivity reliably associated with the events of 1908 has not been successful. Young enthusiasts are involved in the work of a new, large expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1961 under the leadership of K. Florensky. A working hypothesis was proposed by Academician V. Fesenkov: there was an explosion of the nucleus of a small comet, which entered the dense layers of the atmosphere at enormous cosmic speed.
In 1988, members of a research expedition of the Siberian Public Fund "" under the leadership of corresponding member of the Petrovsky Academy of Sciences and Arts (St. Petersburg) Yuri Lavbin discovered metal rods near Vanavara. Lavbin put forward his version of what happened - a huge comet was approaching our planet from space. Some highly developed civilization in space became aware of this. Aliens, in order to save the Earth from a global catastrophe, sent their sentinel spaceship. He was supposed to split the comet. But, unfortunately, the attack of the most powerful cosmic body was not entirely successful for the ship. True, the comet's nucleus crumbled into several fragments. Some of them fell to Earth, and most of they passed by our planet. The earthlings were saved, but one of the fragments damaged the attacking alien ship, and it made an emergency landing on Earth. Subsequently, the ship's crew repaired their car and safely left our planet, leaving on it failed blocks, the remains of which were found by the expedition to the site of the disaster.
Behind long years searching for debris Tunguska meteorite Members of various expeditions discovered a total of 12 wide conical holes in the disaster area. No one knows to what depth they go, since no one has even tried to study them. However, recently, for the first time, researchers thought about the origin of the holes and the pattern of tree collapse in the area of the cataclysm. According to all known theories and practice itself, fallen trunks should lie in parallel rows. And here they are clearly unscientific. This means that the explosion was not classical, but something completely unknown to science. All these facts allowed geophysicists to reasonably assume that a careful study of conical holes in the ground would shed light on the Siberian mystery.
Some scientists have already begun to express the idea of the earthly origin of the phenomenon.
In 2006, according to the president of the fund " Tunguska space phenomenon"Yuri Lavbin, in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River at the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, Krasnoyarsk researchers discovered quartz cobblestones with mysterious writings. According to the researchers, strange signs were applied to the surface of quartz in a technogenic manner, presumably using the influence of plasma. Analyzes of quartz cobblestones that were studied in Krasnoyarsk and in Moscow, showed that quartz contains impurities of cosmic substances that cannot be obtained on Earth. Research has confirmed that the cobblestones are artifacts: many of them are fused layers of plates, each of which is marked with signs of an unknown alphabet. According to Lavbin's hypothesis , quartz cobblestones - fragments of an information container sent to our planet extraterrestrial civilization and exploded as a result of an unsuccessful landing.
The latest is the ice comet hypothesis put forward by physicist Gennady Bybin, who has been studying the Tunguska anomaly for more than 30 years. Bybin believes that the mysterious body was not a stone meteorite, but an icy comet. He came to this conclusion based on the diaries of the first researcher of the “meteorite” fall site, Leonid Kulik. At the scene of the incident, Kulik found a substance in the form of ice covered with peat, but did not attach much importance to it, since he was looking for something completely different. However, this compressed ice with flammable gases frozen into it, found 20 years after the explosion, is not a sign of permafrost, as was commonly believed, but proof that the ice comet theory is correct, the researcher believes. For a comet that was scattered into many pieces after a collision with our planet, the Earth became a kind of hot frying pan. The ice on it quickly melted and exploded. Gennady Bybin hopes that his version will become the only true and last one.
However, most scientists are inclined to believe that it was still a meteorite that exploded above the surface of the Earth. It was his traces that, starting in 1927, were searched for in the area of the explosion by the first Soviet scientific expeditions led by Leonid Kulik. But the usual meteor crater was not at the scene of the incident. Expeditions discovered that around the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, the forest was felled like a fan from the center, and in the center some of the trees remained standing, but without branches.
Subsequent expeditions noticed that the area of fallen forest had characteristic shape
butterflies directed from east - southeast to west - northwest. The total area of fallen forest is about 2,200 square kilometers. Modeling the shape of this area and computer calculations of all the circumstances of the fall showed that the explosion did not occur when the body collided with the earth’s surface, but even before that in the air at an altitude of 5–10 km.
Writers also gave their versions of the Tunguska phenomenon. The famous science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev described the Tunguska phenomenon as a disaster of a spaceship flying towards us from Mars. Writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in their book “Monday Begins on Saturday” put forward a humorous hypothesis about contrarians. It explains the events of 1908 in reverse time, i.e. not by the arrival of the spacecraft to Earth, but by its launch.
But these are all just hypotheses, and the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite it remains a mystery.
Thousands of researchers are trying to understand what happened on June 30, 1908 in the Siberian taiga. To the area Tunguska disaster In addition to Russian expeditions, international expeditions are regularly sent.

30 June

97 years ago the Tunguska meteorite fell to Earth. On June 30, 1908, at about seven o’clock in the morning, a giant fireball flew over the vast territory of Central Siberia in the area between the Lower Tunguska and Lena rivers. His flight was accompanied by sound and light effects and ended with a powerful explosion. Thousands of researchers are trying to understand what exactly happened in the Siberian taiga. But the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite remains a mystery...
- 111 years ago, London's most famous bridge, the Tower Bridge, was opened. The British affectionately call Tower Bridge “a steel skeleton in a stone shirt.” Over more than a hundred years of existence, Tower Bridge has become business card British capital. Its towers offer stunning views of the city, and tourists from all over the world love to take pictures against its background.
- 34 years ago, when returning to Earth, the crew of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft died due to a leak in the descent module. The memory of space heroes is worthily immortalized in history. The ashes of the astronauts rest in the Kremlin wall. Craters on the Moon and small planets are named after them solar system. For many years, ships of the USSR Academy of Sciences bore their names. Busts and memorial plaques were installed in places associated with the life and work of astronauts...

97 years ago (1908) the Tunguska meteorite fell to Earth

On June 30, 1908, at about seven o’clock in the morning, a giant fireball flew over the vast territory of Central Siberia in the area between the Lower Tunguska and Lena rivers. His flight was accompanied by sound and light effects and ended with a powerful explosion. The blast wave destroyed a forest within a radius of 40 kilometers, killed animals, and injured people. Due to a powerful flash of light and a stream of hot gases, a forest fire broke out, completing the devastation of the area. In a vast space bounded on the east by the Yenisei, on the south by the Tashkent-Stavropol-Sevastopol-northern Italy-Bordeaux line, and on the west by the Atlantic coast of Europe, unprecedented in scale and completely unusual light phenomena unfolded, which went down in history as “light nights of the summer of 1908." The clouds, which formed at an altitude of about 80 kilometers, intensely reflected the sun's rays, thereby creating the effect of bright nights even where they had not been observed before. This phenomenon continued for several nights.

In subsequent years, scientists have put forward many hypotheses of the explosion, there are about 100 of them. The first of them is the fall of a giant meteorite. It was his traces that, starting in 1927, were searched for in the area of the explosion by the first Soviet scientific expeditions. But the usual meteor crater was not at the scene of the incident. Subsequent expeditions noticed that the area of fallen forest had a characteristic “butterfly” shape, directed from east-southeast to west-northwest. Modeling the shape of this area and computer calculations of all the circumstances of the fall showed that the explosion did not occur when the body collided with the earth's surface, but even before that in the air at an altitude of 5-10 kilometers. Academician V.G. Fesenkov, an astronomer by profession, put forward a version of the collision of the Earth with a comet. According to another version, it was a body that had great kinetic energy, low density(lower than the density of water), low strength and high volatility, which led to its rapid destruction and evaporation as a result of sharp braking in the lower dense layers of the atmosphere.

There are also such versions: the famous science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev described the Tunguska phenomenon as a disaster of a spaceship flying towards us from Mars; American astronomer La Paz, for example, saw a piece of antimatter in it; his compatriots, physicists A. Jackson and M. Ryan, announced that the Earth had encountered a “black hole”; some believe that it was a fantastic laser beam or a piece of plasma torn off from the Sun; French astronomer and researcher of optical anomalies Felix de Roy suggested that on June 30 the Earth probably collided with a cloud of cosmic dust. In 1965, in the book “Monday Begins on Saturday,” writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky put forward a humorous hypothesis about countermotors. In it, the events of 1908 are explained by the reverse passage of time, i.e. not by the arrival of the spacecraft to Earth, but by its launch.

Thousands of researchers are trying to understand what happened on June 30, 1908 in the Siberian taiga. In addition to Russian expeditions, international expeditions from Poland, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Germany regularly travel to the area of the Tunguska disaster. But the mystery of the Tunguska meteorite remains a mystery.

111 years ago (1894) the most famous London bridge - Tower Bridge - was opened

Tower Bridge was built by engineer Horace Jones in the Gothic style. Tower Bridge is a majestic and beautiful bridge, its unique gate: ships pass through the bridge before getting along the Thames to the city center. Over one million pounds were spent on its construction.

The bridge performs a rather important job: under normal conditions, an endless stream of cars travels across it. And at certain hours the bridge moves apart to allow large ships to pass. The brick abutments of the bridge, which are 60 meters high, imitate the shape of Gothic towers. In addition to the diverging roadway, a pedestrian crossing was installed on the bridge, raised to a height of 44 meters. It serves as a connection between the banks when the lower span is separated and is served by stairs and elevators inside the towers. On the bridge there is an engine room with hydraulic equipment preserved after electrification, a control room, and exhibitions.

The British affectionately call Tower Bridge “a steel skeleton in a stone shirt.” For more than a hundred years of existence, Tower Bridge has become the hallmark of the British capital. Its towers offer stunning views of the city, and tourists from all over the world love to take pictures against its background.

80 years ago (1925) the Stolby nature reserve was founded on the right bank of the Yenisei

State Nature Reserve "Stolby" is a pearl of Siberian nature. It is located on the northwestern spurs of the Eastern Sayan Mountains, bordering the Central Siberian Plateau. The reserve was founded on the initiative of city residents to preserve natural complexes around the picturesque syenite outcrops - stone pillars. Here, among the taiga, on forty-seven thousand hectares, rocks rise - cliffs. There are about a hundred of them. Some of them rise above the surface of the earth up to one hundred meters. For millions of years, rains and winds, frost and sun have carved bizarre figures from wild stone. People gave them names: “Grandfather”, “Big Golden Eagle”, “Lion Gate”, “Vulture”, “Feathers” and others.

The reserve is undergoing extensive scientific work. Scientists are developing methods for restoring cedar in the forests of Siberia, methods for recording sable and assessing hunting grounds, and conducting experiments on the domestication and conservation of numerous animals and birds. IN natural conditions contains more than a hundred typical representatives of the fauna of the region.

Krasnoyarsk “Pillars” are a unique phenomenon. Books and articles have been written about them, and many films have been made. A unique movement of nature lovers - Stolby - was born and lives on “Stolby”, with its own traditions and unique folklore. Outstanding climbers and mountaineers have been trained here. The reserve is visited by thousands of tourists and excursionists. The cable car and excellent ski slopes made it possible to open in Krasnoyarsk the only one in Siberia and on Far East All-Union ski route.

34 years ago(1971) when returning to Earth, the crew of the Soyuz-11 spacecraft died due to a leak in the descent module.

On April 19, 1971, the world's first rocket was launched into space orbit in the USSR. orbital station"Firework". Three crews were preparing to work on it at once: the main one (Vladimir Shatalov, Alexey Eliseev and Nikolay Rukavishnikov), the backup one (Alexey Leonov, Valery Kubasov and Pyotr Kolodin) and the reserve one (Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsaev).

The first to go to the station in April 1971 was the crew of Vladimir Shatalov. The cosmonauts brilliantly coped with the responsibilities assigned to them: Soyuz-10 was expertly docked with Salyut. However, the crew did not have to move to the station. Structural and technical defects in the docking port of the Soyuz spacecraft did not allow the sealing of the docking cavity to be ensured, and the crew was forced to return to Earth.

The understudies began to prepare for the start. Everything was going normally. But already at Baikonur, two days before the launch, doctors did not allow flight engineer Valery Kubasov, a crew member of Alexei Leonov, to fly into space. 10 hours before the launch, a decision was made to fly the crew of Georgy Dobrovolsky. If the crew consisted of two people, they could have been in spacesuits. But the three spacesuits did not fit either in weight or dimensions. And then it was decided to fly in only tracksuits.

The experiments carried out by the cosmonauts in orbit for 23 days, as well as the results of the work, were unique. But the ending of the flight was tragic - the crew died upon returning to Earth. The descent of Soyuz-11 proceeded normally until an altitude of 150 kilometers and the moment of mandatory division of the ship into three parts before entering the atmosphere (at the same time, the household and instrument compartments extend from the descent vehicle of the cabin). At the moment of separation, when the ship was in space, the breathing ventilation valve unexpectedly opened, connecting the cabin with the outside environment, which should have worked much later, near the ground. The pressure in the descent module dropped so rapidly that the astronauts lost consciousness before they could unfasten their seat belts and manually close the hole the size of a five-kopeck coin. The next ship with two cosmonauts, already in spacesuits, launched only two years later.

The memory of space heroes is worthily immortalized in history. The ashes of the astronauts rest in the Kremlin wall. Craters on the Moon and minor planets of the Solar System are named after them. For many years, ships of the USSR Academy of Sciences bore their names. Busts and memorial plaques were installed in places associated with the life and work of astronauts.

The fall of the Tunguska meteorite

Year of the fall

On June 30, 1908, a mysterious object exploded and fell in the earth's atmosphere, later called the Tunguska meteorite.

Crash site

The territory of Eastern Siberia between the Lena and Podkamennaya Tunguska rivers forever remained as the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, when a fiery object, flaring up like the sun and flying several hundred kilometers, fell on it.

According to researchers, strange signs are applied to the surface of quartz in a man-made manner, presumably through the influence of plasma. Analyzes of quartz cobblestones, which were studied in Krasnoyarsk and Moscow, showed that quartz contains impurities of cosmic substances that cannot be obtained on Earth. Research has confirmed that the cobblestones are artifacts: many of them are fused layers of plates, each of which contains signs of an unknown alphabet. According to Lavbin's hypothesis, quartz cobblestones are fragments of an information container sent to our planet by an extraterrestrial civilization and exploded as a result of an unsuccessful landing.

Hypotheses

More than a hundred different hypotheses have been expressed about what happened in the Tunguska taiga: from an explosion of swamp gas to the crash of an alien ship. It was also assumed that an iron or stone meteorite containing nickel iron could have fallen to Earth; icy comet core; unidentified flying object, starship; gigantic ball lightning; a meteorite from Mars, difficult to distinguish from terrestrial rocks. American physicists Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan stated that the Earth encountered a “black hole”; some researchers suggested that it was a fantastic laser beam or a piece of plasma torn off from the Sun; French astronomer and researcher of optical anomalies Felix de Roy suggested that on June 30 the Earth probably collided with a cloud of cosmic dust.

1. Ice comet
The latest is the ice comet hypothesis put forward by physicist Gennady Bybin, who has been studying the Tunguska anomaly for more than 30 years. Bybin believes that the mysterious body was not a stone meteorite, but an icy comet. He came to this conclusion based on the diaries of the first researcher of the “meteorite” fall site, Leonid Kulik. At the scene of the incident, Kulik found a substance in the form of ice covered with peat, but did not attach much importance to it, since he was looking for something completely different. However, this compressed ice with flammable gases frozen into it, found 20 years after the explosion, is not a sign of permafrost, as was commonly believed, but proof that the ice comet theory is correct, the researcher believes. For a comet that was scattered into many pieces after a collision with our planet, the Earth became a kind of hot frying pan. The ice on it quickly melted and exploded. Gennady Bybin hopes that his version will become the only true and last one.

2.Meteorite
however, most scientists are inclined to believe that it was still a meteorite that exploded above the surface of the Earth. It was his traces that, starting in 1927, were searched for in the area of the explosion by the first Soviet scientific expeditions led by Leonid Kulik. But the usual meteor crater was not at the scene of the incident. Expeditions discovered that around the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, the forest was felled like a fan from the center, and in the center some of the trees remained standing, but without branches.

On June 30, 1908, at about 7 a.m. local time, a unique natural event occurred over the territory of Eastern Siberia in the basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River (Evenkiy District of the Krasnoyarsk Territory).
For several seconds, a dazzling bright fireball was observed in the sky, moving from southeast to northwest. The flight of this unusual celestial body accompanied by a sound reminiscent of thunder. Along the path of the fireball, which was visible in Eastern Siberia within a radius of up to 800 kilometers, there was a powerful dust trail that persisted for several hours.

After the light phenomena, a super-powerful explosion was heard over the deserted taiga at an altitude of 7-10 kilometers. The energy of the explosion ranged from 10 to 40 megatons of TNT, which is comparable to the energy of two thousand simultaneously detonated nuclear bombs, like the one dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
The disaster was witnessed by residents of the small trading post of Vanavara (now the village of Vanavara) and those few Evenki nomads who were hunting near the epicenter of the explosion.

In a matter of seconds, a forest within a radius of about 40 kilometers was torn down by a blast wave, animals were destroyed, and people were injured. At the same time, under the influence of light radiation, the taiga flared up tens of kilometers around. A complete fall of trees occurred over an area of more than 2,000 square kilometers.
In many villages, shaking of the soil and buildings was felt, window glass was breaking, and household utensils were falling from shelves. Many people, as well as pets, were knocked down by the air wave.
The explosive air wave that circled the globe was recorded by many meteorological observatories around the world.

In the first 24 hours after the disaster, in almost the entire northern hemisphere - from Bordeaux to Tashkent, from the shores of the Atlantic to Krasnoyarsk - there was twilight of unusual brightness and color, night glow of the sky, bright silvery clouds, daytime optical effects - halos and crowns around the sun. The glow from the sky was so strong that many residents could not sleep. The clouds, which formed at an altitude of about 80 kilometers, intensely reflected the sun's rays, thereby creating the effect of bright nights even where they had not been observed before. In a number of towns one could freely read a small print newspaper at night, and in Greenwich a photograph was received at midnight seaport. This phenomenon continued for several more nights.
The disaster caused fluctuations magnetic field, recorded in Irkutsk and the German city of Kiel. The magnetic storm resembled in its parameters the disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field observed after high-altitude nuclear explosions.

In 1927, the pioneer researcher of the Tunguska disaster, Leonid Kulik, suggested that a large iron meteorite fell in Central Siberia. In the same year, he examined the scene of the event. A radial forest fall was discovered around the epicenter within a radius of 15-30 kilometers. The forest turned out to be felled like a fan from the center, and in the center some of the trees remained standing, but without branches. The meteorite was never found.
The comet hypothesis was first put forward by the English meteorologist Francis Whipple in 1934; it was subsequently thoroughly developed by the Soviet astrophysicist, academician Vasily Fesenkov.
In 1928-1930, the USSR Academy of Sciences conducted two more expeditions under the leadership of Kulik, and in 1938-1939, aerial photography of the central part of the area of the fallen forest was carried out.
Since 1958, the study of the epicenter area was resumed, and the Committee on Meteorites of the USSR Academy of Sciences conducted three expeditions under the leadership of the Soviet scientist Kirill Florensky. At the same time, research was begun by amateur enthusiasts united in the so-called complex amateur expedition (CEA).
Scientists are faced with the main mystery of the Tunguska meteorite - there was clearly a powerful explosion above the taiga, which felled a forest over a huge area, but what caused it left no traces.

The Tunguska disaster is one of the most mysterious phenomena of the twentieth century.

There are more than a hundred versions. At the same time, perhaps no meteorite fell. In addition to the version about the fall of a meteorite, there were hypotheses that the Tunguska explosion was associated with giant ball lightning, a black hole that entered the Earth, an explosion natural gas from a tectonic crack, a collision of the Earth with a mass of antimatter, a laser signal from an alien civilization, or a failed experiment by physicist Nikola Tesla. One of the most exotic hypotheses is the crash of an alien spaceship.
According to many scientists, the Tunguska body was still a comet that completely evaporated at high altitude.

In 2013, Ukrainian and American geologists of grains found by Soviet scientists near the crash site of the Tunguska meteorite came to the conclusion that they belonged to a meteorite from the class of carbonaceous chondrites, and not a comet.

Meanwhile, Phil Bland, an employee of the Australian Curtin University, presented two arguments questioning the connection of the samples with the Tunguska explosion. According to the scientist, they are suspicious low concentration iridium, which is not typical for meteorites, and the peat where the samples were found is not dated to 1908, meaning the stones found could have fallen to Earth earlier or later than the famous explosion.

On October 9, 1995, in the southeast of Evenkia near the village of Vanavara, by decree of the Russian government, the Tungussky State Nature Reserve was established.

The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources

On June 30, 1908, at approximately 7:15 a.m. local time, an explosion or series of explosions was heard over the taiga in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. According to estimates made later, the power of the explosion was approximately 2000 times greater than the power of the explosion atomic bomb, later dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima.

A bright flash, visible from hundreds of kilometers away, set the taiga on fire, but then a powerful shock wave extinguished the fire and toppled trees over an area of more than 1,000 square kilometers. The tree trunks burned from the outside are preserved and visible even 100 years later. Ground tremors and disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field have been recorded around the world. Over the next few nights, short at this time, a multi-colored glow of the sky was observed over the entire northern hemisphere.

Over the past 100 years, more than a hundred different hypotheses of what happened have appeared, about a third of which are based on specific facts and claim to be scientific. Since all this happened in an area practically uninhabited by people, where it was difficult to reach, the initial hypothesis was the fall of a huge stone or iron meteorite, judging by the shaking of the earth, weighing millions of tons. The meteorite was named Tunguska.

Only in 1921, Academician V.I. Vernadsky instructed meteorite researcher L.A. Kulik to organize an expedition to the site of the Tunguska meteorite fall. But that year it was not possible to reach the site of the meteorite fall. And only in May 1927, Kulik’s expedition found itself at the epicenter, but did not discover the crater. It was suggested that the meteorite fell apart as it approached Earth, but until the late thirties, several expeditions failed to discover any debris. Expeditions discovered that around the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, the forest was felled like a fan from the center, and in the center some of the trees remained standing, but without branches.

Subsequent expeditions noticed that the area of fallen forest had a characteristic “butterfly” shape, directed from east-southeast to west-northwest. The total area of fallen forest is about 2,200 square kilometers. Modeling the shape of this area and computer calculations of all the circumstances of the fall showed that the explosion did not occur when the body collided with the earth’s surface, but even before that in the air at an altitude of 5-10 km.

To receive money from the authorities for subsequent expeditions and Scientific research, scientists even hypothesized that the meteorite consisted of millions of tons of nickel, which the USSR industry really needed. A government decree was adopted to continue research, and in 1942 it was even planned to extend a railway for the export of valuable strategic raw materials. But the war began, Kulik went to the front, was captured and died, and the expeditions stopped for a long time.

In the mid-40s, with the development of nuclear research and the creation of the atomic bomb, the hypothesis of a nuclear explosion appeared. It was proposed after consultations with physicists by science fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev. In 1945, he published the story “Explosion,” which described an alien atomic interplanetary ship that exploded as it approached Earth. But Kulik’s pre-war expeditions did not find not only meteorite fragments, but also any parts of the ship.

After a nuclear explosion, radioactive isotopes should remain on the earth. And their composition would be different during fission reactions ( nuclear explosion) or fusion (hydrogen explosion). And in the 50s, increased radioactivity was even discovered in those places. But the samples also contained short-lived radioactive isotopes that could not survive for fifty years after the explosion. It turned out that this was radioactive fallout from our nuclear weapons tests.

The meteorite hypothesis, supported by many researchers, successfully existed until 1958. According to it, the Tunguska cosmic body was a fairly large iron or stone meteorite. Subsequently, it became clear that this point of view is not able to explain a number of phenomena observed both at the time of the disaster and after it. First of all, it is not clear why the meteorite exploded like an explosive and where its substance disappeared. It is completely unclear how in this case optical anomalies could arise thousands of kilometers from the site of the disaster. Why did plant growth accelerate at the epicenter? How, from the point of view of this hypothesis, can we explain the effect of the magnetic storm that played out in the ionosphere immediately after the explosion?

Quite exotic hypotheses for the explosion that occurred were also proposed. For example, that a huge piece of antimatter approached the Earth. It annihilated with matter, releasing enormous energy. In this case, there should be no material or radioactive traces left. But the probability that antimatter flew a long distance through our universe, consisting of matter, and did not gradually annihilate, constantly encountering cosmic dust and larger objects, is negligible.

It was also hypothesized that at that time in New York Nikola Tesla was conducting experiments on collecting and concentrating energy from outer space. But no facts have been preserved, and Tesla himself had already died almost simultaneously with Kulik.

However, regardless of this, interest in the meteorite hypothesis does not wane in our time. In 1993, a group of American scientists from NASA and the University of Wisconsin carried out calculations according to which the Tunguska meteorite could have been a small rocky asteroid with a diameter of about 30 meters that exploded at an altitude of 8 kilometers.

Since 1958, the Committee on Meteorites of the USSR Academy of Sciences, under the leadership of the famous geochemist K.P. Florensky, has been conducting a series of expeditions to the site of the Tunguska disaster. At the same time, more than 30 years of research into the problem was unfolding by a unique scientific and public team of CSE (complex amateur expedition), led in the first years by biophysicist G.F. Plekhanov, and then by microbiologist N.V. Vasiliev. The main area of work was related to the search for cosmic matter, studying the consequences of the explosion and determining trajectory parameters with subsequent identification of the cosmic body. The results of these studies were unexpected. Firstly, a survey of more than 700 eyewitnesses showed a clear contradiction in the direction of the car's movement. It seemed that not one, but several bodies were moving with a significant spread from the southern to the eastern trajectory, although there is not a single testimony where eyewitnesses observed two fireballs at the same time. Secondly, thousands of samples taken from the disaster site showed that total the substance dispersed in the taiga hardly exceeded two tons, and according to the astronomer, academician V.G. Fesenkov, the mass of the Tunguska cosmic body before entering the atmosphere was 1 million tons. Explaining this contradiction was not easy. The absence of large fragments of cosmic matter at the explosion site forced experts to recall the comet hypothesis of F. Whipple and I.S. Astapovich, proposed back in the 30s. Thoroughly developed by V.G. Fesenkov, G.I. Petrov, V.P. Stulov, V.P. Korobeinikov and a number of other well-known specialists, this hypothesis has become a working model for researchers for more than 30 years. In terms of the degree of scientific validity, it deserves the closest attention. At the same time, the beginning of the 60s was marked by serious controversy between supporters of the nuclear and comet hypotheses. Arguments in favor of one point of view or another could only be obtained at the scene of the disaster. For this purpose, the radioactivity of soils and plants was studied, their isotopic and chemical composition was studied. The first results of field work revealed complete absence radioactive contamination of the area. Subsequent studies of the isotopic composition carried out by E.M. Kolesnikov’s group proved the non-nuclear nature of the Tunguska explosion. And during a layer-by-layer study of high-moor peat bogs, melted silicate and magnetite microspheres of cosmic origin were discovered with increased content elements such as aluminum, bromine, cesium, cobalt, lead, iron, ytterbium, sodium, zinc and iridium. The latter, as it turned out, is a purely cosmic element since its content is earth's crust relatively few. In my own way chemical composition The material collected from the disaster site approached the spectra of comets. Undoubtedly, this was an argument in favor of the comet hypothesis. But it does not yet remove all questions related to the problem.

Oddly enough, but 90 years after the disaster, it is premature to speak with complete confidence about the validity of any hypothesis, since none of the points of view presented to date is able to explain the entire complex of phenomena that accompanied Tunguska explosion. This, in fact, is the main paradox of the problem. Whoever undertakes its solution, he will definitely “stumble” on one of the facts listed below, which undoubtedly have a direct bearing on the Tunguska disaster:

1. Flight of a cosmic body in the Earth’s atmosphere on June 30, 1908;
2. High-altitude explosion in the area with geographic coordinates 60° 53 north latitude and 101° 53 east longitude;
3. Air wave;
4. Forest collapse in the area of the explosion;
5. Tree burn at the epicenter;
6. Seismic phenomena;
7. Magnetic disturbance in the ionosphere;
8. Atmospheric optical anomalies observed in the western part of the Eurasian continent.

Today, there are dozens of hypotheses proposing various disaster scenarios. Krasnoyarsk researcher D. Timofeev suggests that the explosion occurred due to the detonation of natural gas ignited by a meteorite that flew into the atmosphere. Physicists M. Dmitriev and V. Zhuravlev explain the events of 1908 by a breakthrough of a clot of solar plasma, which caused the formation and then explosion of several thousand ball lightning with a volume of a quarter of a cubic kilometer. According to American scientists M. Jackson and M. Ryan, the destruction in the Siberian taiga in 1908 was caused by the collision of the Earth with a “black hole”.

Moscow physicist A. Olkhovatov is firmly convinced that the Tunguska event is a kind of unusual earth earthquake. An equally strange explanation is the explosion of a UFO, the departure of a gravity bolide from underground and the explosion of “information containers.” Such hypotheses are interesting only for their unusualness, but, alas, they do not bring us any closer to solving the problem.

Repeated attempts have been made to connect the Tunguska phenomenon with some unexplained finds near the explosion site and beyond. IN Lately these included: the mysterious Patomsky crater, located in the north Irkutsk region; unusual stones found in 1993 near the city.

Krasnoyarsk Yu. Lavbin; “Your iron”, mysterious in its composition, was discovered in 1976 in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; "Devil's Cemetery" near the village. Kezhmoy on the Angara River; unusual explosion in Sasovo. All these statements suffer from one thing common disadvantage- ignorance of factual material related to the events of 1908. Apparently out of desire thinking man collect the kaleidoscope of events happening around him into something whole, we will witness many more similar messages...

According to another version, a body that had high kinetic energy collided with the Earth, but had a low density (lower than the density of water), low strength and high volatility, which led to its rapid destruction and evaporation as a result of sharp braking in the lower dense layers of the atmosphere. Such a body could be a comet, consisting of frozen water and gases in the form of “snow,” interspersed with refractory particles.

In 1988, members of the research expedition of the Siberian Public Foundation “Tunguska Space Phenomenon”, led by corresponding member of the Petrovsky Academy of Sciences and Arts (St. Petersburg) Yuri Lavbin, discovered metal rods near Vanavara. Lavbin put forward his version of what happened - a huge comet was approaching our planet from space. Some highly developed civilization in space became aware of this. Aliens to save the Earth from global catastrophe, sent out their sentinel spaceship. He was supposed to split the comet. But, unfortunately, the attack of the most powerful cosmic body was not entirely successful for the ship. True, the comet's nucleus crumbled into several fragments. Some of them fell on Earth, and most of them passed by our planet. The earthlings were saved, but one of the fragments damaged the attacking alien ship, and it made an emergency landing on Earth. Subsequently, the ship's crew repaired their car and safely left our planet, leaving on it failed blocks, the remains of which were found by the expedition to the site of the disaster.

Over many years of searching for the debris of the space alien, members of various expeditions discovered a total of 12 wide conical holes in the disaster area. No one knows to what depth they go, since no one has even tried to study them. However, recently, for the first time, researchers thought about the origin of the holes and the pattern of tree collapse in the area of the cataclysm. According to all known theories and practice itself, fallen trunks should lie in parallel rows. And here they are clearly unscientific. This means that the explosion was not classical, but something completely unknown to science. All these facts allowed geophysicists to reasonably assume that a careful study of conical holes in the ground would shed light on the Siberian mystery. Some scientists have already begun to express the idea of the earthly origin of the phenomenon.

In 2006, according to the president of the Tunguska Space Phenomenon Foundation, Yuri Lavbin, in the area of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River at the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, Krasnoyarsk researchers discovered quartz cobblestones with mysterious inscriptions. According to researchers, strange signs are applied to the surface of quartz in a man-made manner, presumably through the influence of plasma. Analyzes of quartz cobblestones, which were studied in Krasnoyarsk and Moscow, showed that quartz contains impurities of cosmic substances that cannot be obtained on Earth. Research has confirmed that the cobblestones are artifacts: many of them are “joined” layers of plates, each of which contains signs of an unknown alphabet. According to Lavbin’s hypothesis, quartz cobblestones are fragments of an information container sent to our planet by an extraterrestrial civilization and exploded as a result of an unsuccessful landing.

The Tunguska disaster is one of the well-studied, but at the same time one of the most mysterious phenomena of the twentieth century. To a certain extent, we were lucky; we witnessed a rare (in the history of mankind) event. At first glance, the impression of complete clarity is created. On the other hand, dozens of expeditions, hundreds of scientific articles, thousands of researchers, fifty points of view, could only increase knowledge about it, but did not answer the generally simple question: what was it?

One thing is certain: the Tunguska taiga still stores a lot unsolved mysteries. There are more than enough mysteries in it. At least what is the crater found in 1994 behind the epicenter of the explosion along the continuation of the trajectory? Where is the “dry river” furrow described by the Evenki hunters? How did the craters discovered by L.A. Kulik arise and disappear in our time? What is the nature of the magnetic storm that followed the explosion? Why did the Tunguska meteorite explode like the most powerful explosive? What is this strange cosmic substance and where did it disappear? It is no less interesting to find out what trajectory the Tunguska fireball was flying along. But the most amazing mystery is why thousands of researchers are trying to understand what happened on June 30, 1908 in the Siberian taiga.

On October 9, 1995, by decree of the Government of the Russian Federation, the Tungussky State Nature Reserve was established with a total area of 296,562 hectares. Its territory is unique. It stands out among other nature reserves and sanctuaries in the world in that it is the only one globe area that allows direct study environmental consequences space disasters.

In the Tunguska Nature Reserve, due to the uniqueness of the 1908 event, as an exception, limited tourist activities are allowed for the purpose of environmental education of the population, familiarization with the beautiful natural sites of the reserve, the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite. There are three environmental education routes. Two of them are by water, along the picturesque rivers Kimchu and Khushma, the third is on foot along the “Kulik trail” - the famous route of the discoverer of the site of the Tunguska meteorite disaster.

Related video:

Version of the Tunguska explosion

It's no secret that every year expeditions are sent to the Podkamennaya Tunguska region to study this strange phenomenon. Scientists managed to quite accurately answer the question: “How was it?” But the answer to the question: “What was that?” still not. A comet, a meteorite, a black hole, a signal from space, a plasmoid, the result of an earthquake, the crash of an alien ship - these are just some of the versions of the disaster that happened in the Tunguska taiga at the beginning of the 20th century.

The “seekers”, having studied all the assumptions and arguments, will put forward their version of the event, the details of which you can learn from the program.

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