Tunguska meteoroid12/29/2023 The RAS conducted a radioscopic analysis of the samples and found that, despite the commonly held belief that Lake Cheko was barely over a century old, it was almost three times as old.įrom the press release at The Russian Geographical Society: They took the core samples, which were pulled from the deepest trench in Lake Cheko, to the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Siberian Branch of The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). This would be done through geochemical and biochemical analyses. So the team took core samples of the bottom sediments of Lake Cheko with which to get a more accurate assessment of just how old the lake at the middle of the Tunguska event mystery might be. In short, it might have existed prior to the Tunguska event itself. The lake, according to some, had not existed prior to 1908, but the scientists were working on the supposition that, given that the area had been poorly mapped prior to the 20th century, accounts could be wrong concerning the age of the lake. Sputnik International reported this week that Russian scientists from Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk visited in 2016 the area believed to be, according to one theory, an impact crater for the Tunguska event meteorite - Lake Cheko. But one thing it was not caused by, Russian scientists are now claiming, was a meteor with a meteorite impactor. The Tunguska event's cause is still a mystery, though, because that particular question remains unanswered. Though recent research has claimed both to have unveiled an impact crater for the Tunguska event and to have pinned the explosion on a dust- and gas-rich comet, NASA says that the most widely-accepted explanation is that it was an exploding meteor.The cause of the Tunguska event of 1908 remains a mystery today, even though one of the prevailing theories - that a meteorite had scored the Earth and displaced thousands of trees in Siberia near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River and created a crater that became Lake Cheko - has now been debunked, because theories, by their very construct, can be tested and sometimes found wanting. Locally, hundreds of reindeer, the livelihood of local herders, were killed, but there was no direct evidence that any person perished in the blast. Night skies glowed, and reports came in that people who lived as far away as Asia could read newspapers outdoors as late as midnight. Dense clouds formed over the region at high altitudes which reflected sunlight from beyond the horizon. The resulting seismic shockwave registered with sensitive barometers as far away as England. “he combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs,” says NASA. The Tunguska meteor, however, was much bigger, and its explosion was likely much nearer to the surface. Like today’s Russian meteor, the Tunguska meteor was thought not to have hit the ground in a conventional impact, but rather to have exploded above the ground. Now known as the Tunguska event, an expedition to the area made in 1921, says the Guardian, “laid bare the devastation caused by impact, with 80m of trees levelled over 830 square miles (2,150 sq km).” The explosion sent out a shockwave that decimated the region. On June 30, 1908, says NASA, a truly massive meteor exploded near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia. The meteor’s break-up released energy equivalent to a few hundred thousand tons of TNT. But while it was surely scary for those whose heads it passed over, compared to a disaster that took place a few thousand miles to the east more than 100 years ago, today’s meteor was rather puny. Photo: Vokrug Sveta / Wikimedia CommonsĮarly this morning in Russia, when a meteor broke up a few dozen kilometers above ground, its supersonic flight and mid-air death generated shock waves that rattled houses, broke windows, and sent dozens to the hospital. Trees blown over by the shock wave of the 1908 Tunguska meteor.
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