January 3, 2019 • 42 mins
In 1908, the most powerful meteoroid explosion in recorded history happened over a remote area of Siberia. But the weird thing is there was no impact crater and no asteroid to be found – so was it an asteroid? (Yes.)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
the trio known as Stuff you Should Know the trio.
(00:23):
Mm hmm, Jerry came to our live show. I know,
I'm still a little giddy and um in amazement. It's
been a while, Jaars. I mean, I know it's not personal,
but I just remember she used to actually go on
tour with us where she got a family before she
(00:46):
checked out. Yeah, other people more than nuts. I'd also
like to point out the um fact that Jerry is
writhing and discomfort right now, Chuck. Yeah, you're really sticking
a tour. No, she's fine. Um, well, it was a
great show, probably because Jerry was there and everybody, well,
(01:08):
I guess you would have heard it by now because
these are coming out after Christmas. Time Warp. Let's do
the time warp dance, Chuck, and everybody's like, gee, she
would be nice to see some of the things you're
talking about. What you can do maybe next year you
mean in person? Yeah, if you want to do another
(01:28):
live Christmas show, sure, Yeah, I'm done with that. I mean,
we paid money for Christmas decorations. We did not to
feel like we need to reuse those. YEA, hopefully everybody
has heard it already and now they're like, yes, I
know exactly what these guys are talking about, and I'm
enjoying this horribly awkward intro diversion. It's not awkward. Speaking
(01:50):
of intro divergence, Chuck, I want to mention two things. Okay, Um,
you know, the Stuff Network has a ton of really
good shows and there's one that I was on recently
called Behind the Bastards. I was on a two parter.
It was it was nice. So Robert Evans is the host,
(02:12):
and he basically just does tons of research about some
of the worst human beings who have ever lived, many
of whom are celebrated in some quarters, and he just
kind of tears him down to size. Did you do
a show on me? No, you're just celebrated. There's no
tearing you down. I'm sure people tear me down. I
don't care. The ones that I sat in on were, Um,
(02:33):
we're based on scientific racism, history of scientific racism and
how it's been used to justify like colonialism and all
sorts of stuff and the level of of research this
cat does is astounding. Yeah, it's a good show. It is.
It's a great show. So, um, I was on that.
But that's a good maybe a good primer, but really
(02:54):
any behind the Bastards would be a great place to start. Yeah,
the show was was a and I don't want to
say some surprising success because Robert's awesome, but um, I
think everyone was just like, wow, look at this thing,
Look at him, go, look at him. Go. And we've
got another news show actually from our pals that stuff
to blow your mind. Joe and Robert. Yes, they just
(03:17):
launched a show called Invention. I don't remember if they
went with the exclamation point or not, but it's just
awesome because I think no, but that boy, their album
art is so cool. It's it's really great. It's just
a cool maze where you're just waiting for a minuteur
to leap out. Yeah. And for the people that are
like album art, what are you talking about? Did they
(03:37):
record an lp uh little industry lingo everybody, the little
icons that you see on your podcast players, it's called
album art in the industry for some reason. Yeah, I
still haven't figured that one out. I think it's just
a hold over from um iTunes days, I guess, But
(03:57):
like what, it would be funny if they called it
like the single art, that would be pretty funny. Actually,
still never bought a single in my life. Oh I have.
I don't remember what they were, but I have. So anyway,
go check out Invention. You're gonna love it. If you're
a stuff to blow your mind fan, it's Joe and
(04:18):
Robert doing their thing but on different topics, you're just
gonna love it. And then if you're not a stuff
to blow your mind fan, well you're welcome for introducing
YouTube to awesome podcasts at once. Yeah, those guys are great. Ye.
So uh okay, let's talk about our own thing. Okay,
let's do our own stuff. Yeah, what about us? So
(04:39):
we're talking, let's get in the way back machine, and
we need to put on our high temperature protective suits
that we used to hang out on volcanoes sometimes. Well,
and also our low temperature protective suits are in the back.
They are we don't need them for this one. Well,
(05:00):
what day are we going to We're going to June eight,
so sure, it's probably about seventies seventy degrees actually early
in the morning. We're going to get there around around
seven am to give ourselves some time to get set up.
But seven am on June thirtieth, nineteen o eight in
the Russian wilderness around the Pudka Manya Tungusca, which means
(05:25):
the stony Tunguska River. Um, it was probably about fifty degrees,
Will say, okay, yeah, which is I mean that is
like choice summertime weather for the Siberian Plateau. Yeah, and
this place is gorgeous. So the stony Tunguska River is
a nice, wide, meandering, slow river, and it's name stony
(05:46):
because the bottom is all beautiful pebbles and it just
kind of its banks are not really well defined. It
just kind of goes into the land and swamp land
and then suddenly the land rises upward into ridges with
huge all evergreens everywhere. It's just gorgeous. I love it here.
You know what we call those rocks in the South
(06:07):
skipping rocks. They are skipping rocks. They call them that
in Russia too. Oh really yeah, Skivinski rocks. Emily the
other day was like, I wish I could skip rocks,
and I was like, dude, you just gotta get the
right rocks. That's really the key. I mean, this show,
there's techniques in the wrist and everything, but it really
(06:28):
is the rock. Although so there are people who can
skip just about any rock you handem well that I'm
a pretty good skipper, but you still need those good, little, smooth,
little river rocks. It's true. It makes it way easier
for sure. So in this beautiful place, I also failed
to mention there's lots of reindeer wandering around and they're
not wild. They're actually being herded by the Evenki people
(06:49):
also known as the toong goose Um, who are basically
nomadic reindeer herders that live in the area. Yeah, these
are working deer, right. So everything's pretty idyllic and sweet
and nice. It's the Siberian summer. And then all of
a sudden, there's a streak of cloud across the sky,
(07:10):
a fireball at the tip. It looks like about a spear,
and then all of a sudden, this is seven seventeen
am local time, all of a sudden, that fireball disappears,
and then a huge flash of light explodes in the sky.
And that's followed very quickly by a huge burst of heat,
(07:30):
and then after that is followed by a huge shock wave,
and a massive explosion has just taken place, the likes
of which have never been seen in recorded human history. Yeah,
where are we? Are We dead now? No, we're in
our protective bubble. Since we're actually visiting from another time,
we're still in this time. We're just kind of visiting
(07:52):
as in like a movie. I have never really quite
wrapped my head around the physics of it. But we're safe.
We're not dead now. If Jerry killed us while we
were paying attention to um, the Tungusco blast in this life,
we would be dead. Yeah. When you talk about explosions, um,
this was depending on where you look, Uh, it was
(08:15):
something in the order of a hundred to one thousand
times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. I did
the math. I saw two hundred to two thousand times
more powerful. Yeah. Man, this that's the thing. When you're
talking about explosions in night. Sure it's gonna be arranged,
but the thing is, the Hiroshima bomb was fifteen killo
(08:35):
tons fifteen thousand tons of t NT yield. Yeah, it
was a big explosion, so much so and we'll get
to more details, but supposedly you could see the light
from this thing as far away as London. Yeah, there
was a lot of worldwide effects that happened from it. Yeah,
so the Hiroshima woman was fifteen kilo tons. This is
(08:58):
an estimated three to third mega tons, million tons of
t n T. Just an astoundingly greater explosive force, and
it just happened out of the blue, literally out of
the clear blue sky on this day, on June nineteen
o eight. Yep, that's right. And uh, thankfully it's not
(09:21):
a very populated area, but there there are people there,
and there are you know, native tribes people that make
their way there and they live in huts and they
raised those reindeer, and while there weren't a lot of
people there, it created Uh, it was. It was an
awful thing if you lived in the area. Some people
(09:42):
died of of shock and heart attacks, reindeer died, huts
were leveled. It really kind of wiped out the way
of life for these people. Yeah, yeah, big time, because
I mean, like, if you live in Siberia, you're spending
your summer like preparing for the winter, and this blast
like just leveled their supplies, the deer, the reindeer that
they depend on. It like had a huge impact on
(10:03):
them and some people some some people did die, although
I think um, no one died directly like being blown
to bits by the blast. It was like, um, elderly
people had heart attacks and things like that. Yeah, And
it ended up it was a very interesting pattern that
emerged here. So these trees were flattened out in a
(10:24):
radial pattern that pointed away from the center of this
explosion over an area this was about like close to
seven seventy five square miles. Oh my god, which is
a huge, huge explosion. Uh. There were trees that remains standing,
and this is really interesting, but there were no branches,
no leaves, no uh, no needles or anything. They were
(10:48):
just basically the the stem and the trunk of the
trees bear standing straight up. Yeah. And that that was
Those trees were right in the middle of the blast,
the radio blast pat Yeah. And the fact that they
were basically just stripped bear means that it was a
very huge but super fast impact that blasted all those
(11:10):
branches off without affecting the tree itself. Yeah. So the
this this blast, this explosion is very hot, fast, explosion
actually lit the trees on fire from the temperature that
formed the leading edge of the explosion, and then the
shock wave that followed that moved the air actually put
the fire out, so they were like flash charred and
(11:31):
then immediately extinguished. Yeah, there's one quote here from uh,
I mean because this was there's not a lot of
direct accounts, but they do have a few, and we'll
talk about how in a minute. But this is one
hot wind blew past us the ground and all the
huts trembled, causing the sod packing to fall from the ceilings.
(11:53):
The glass was blasted out of the window frames. Scary moment. Yeah, yeah, no,
I can't even imagine. Supposedly, the um the Evenki people
believed that their god ug Dy who is I think
the god of either lightning or fire or thunder one
of those. Um. I've seen different accounts of it. Um,
(12:16):
they that they assumed. So imagine this like you're the
only people that you're the only people are used some
reindeer hurting tribes people who live in the area. Um,
and this happens and you have no scientific frame of
reference for it, and UM, you believe your god came
to punish you wipe out all of your stores and
all of your reindeer and everything, and then that's just
(12:36):
what you had to live with. Because you were in
such a remote area. No one knew about this. No
one knew that this happened for a very long time, actually,
Like I think some of the local papers began to
report it by the end of the summer, but the
larger world had had no real ideal what had happened,
even though there were effects worldwide, but no one could
(12:59):
no one traced it back to this this moment in
Siberia for decades, at least a full decade I think
actually too. Yeah, And it wasn't like, uh, it wasn't
like the scientific community just descended upon this place ever,
really like they've and we'll talk about some of the
superstars of uh, particularly this one man that went and investigated.
(13:22):
But uh, I mean that's one of the reasons that
we still don't know exactly what happened. We have a
pretty good idea, which will say for later, but there
aren't Uh. This was a singular event. It's not the
kind of thing that we could say, well, this is
like that other thing that happened right exactly, Yes, yeah, Yeah,
it's it's there's nothing like although they they think that
(13:44):
there was at least one other thing that happened like
it in the twentie century. Um. Actually now to two
things have happened that are similar to it. So we're
kind of dancing around it a little bit. Um. But
let me tell you, let me point out one thing
that has happened. Even though this is considered far and
(14:04):
away the largest cosmic I guess explosion that you that
that we we have ever recorded, there was something else
that happened in Brazil in nineteen thirty near the Crusa.
I think I'm saying that right river um where there
was a very similar event, huge explosion in the sky
(14:25):
um scared the Bejesus out of the indigenous tribes living there,
burned a significant portion of the Amazon for a full month.
Um And there was a Jesuit missionary who um came
along five days after and got a lot of firsthand
accounts from that one. But they think it was similar
but much smaller than Tunguska. Yeah. And and the mystery
(14:49):
of this whole thing has led to some weird theories
that will hit on later that are I mean some
of them of course, just like aliens and beasts and
things like that, which is the we obviously no, that's
not the case, but it still remains somewhat of a
mystery after you know, a hundred plus years right um.
And then so there's one other that this was an
(15:11):
unrecorded history as far as we consider recorded history typically,
but there there's evidence that this happened one other time
and then this time people weren't so lucky. At something
like about thirty years ago around the Dead Sea um
there was a large area I think about five hundred
(15:33):
square kilometers wide, which is a pretty significant amount of
land that was just wiped bear of of life, including
humans living in the area at the time, and that
it was an explosion from the sky and it wiped
out one village in particular called tall l Hammam And
get this, chuck, you know what Tall l hamm was
(15:55):
also called at this time thirty years ago. Saw them
that interesting. So they think that this is where the
legend of sodom being wiped out comes from. That it
was actually an explosion much like Tungusca. And they found
shards of um like pottery from the time that the
outsides have been turned to glass some of the particles
(16:18):
inside have been gasified. And for this to have happened
without like doing anything more to the to the pottery
means that it happened like in an instant, and that
the air temperature was suddenly about four thousand degrees fahrenheit.
And the other thing that happened too, and this I
think also kind of bolstered the Sodom legend, was that
(16:38):
um a lot of the dead sea salts were pushed
across the land, um over this huge amount of land
and took like what was once fertile and turned it
into like dead sterile land because it was salted, and
it took something like six years for the area to
recover from that. In that fascinating let's take a break,
(16:59):
because so I think you can tell him getting a
little worked up here. All right, Well we'll be right back,
everybody with more amazing nous, alright, dude. So from the outset,
(17:33):
some scientific minded types were like, well, I'm hearing reports
of this this weird event that happened in eight in Tunguska,
the Tungusca area, and it sounds to me a lot
like a meteorite. So I'm gonna go check out you know,
the whole thing and try to find this meteorite. Yeah,
I mean that was one of the early theories. Uh.
(17:54):
There were seismographs that did register some activity, so some
people thought it was an earthquake at first. Uh. It
lit up the sky um and created this massive dust plume.
So that's where people in like London and Germany. Um,
they said that they could read newspapers at midnight even
that far away. So it was it was causing a
(18:16):
little bit of commotion in the scientific community. Uh. And
still you know, consider this as was eight. Um. It's
hard for a word to get around, so you can
hardly blame people with you know, this event happened kind
of in the middle of nowhere in nineteen o eight,
and it didn't exactly like you know, shake the world.
But there was one man, uh and this was uh,
(18:37):
this was later on. His name was Leonid Kulick, and
he was He was a scientist. He had a pretty
interesting life and career. Um. He was born in eighteen
eighty three in Estonia, which was later part of the
Soviet Union. He studied math and he studied science. He
fought in both World War One and World War Two,
(18:58):
which is really interesting because I'm curious about the number
of people who were unfortunate enough to experience both those wars. Yeah,
there were probably a lot, not a ton. I mean,
if you do the math, like, you would have had
to have been pretty young and then pretty old to
have fought in both of these. Um. But in nineteen
(19:21):
uh one he had the task of examining meteorites within
the Soviet Union. And that's where I got the impression
that the first sort of a scientific fire was lit
under his his butt to uh to get into studying meteorites. Yeah, well, no,
he was already studying meteorites, and he heard some he
read some of those local press clippings that had had
(19:44):
been written like ten, ten or twelve years before, and
that that he kind of put piece together like, oh,
this sounds a lot like a meteorite impact. My job
is already to go fine meteorites because they you know,
when they strike the ground, they have all of this
rich interroal or with them. So I'm gonna go find
it and um the government can come mind it, and
(20:05):
that's my job. So he if if Leonig Kulik had
not bred some of these accounts and then traveled to
the area. Um, we would probably not have anywhere near
the kind of um understanding or awareness of them the
impact that we have today. Yeah. So was that the
(20:29):
sinct enough for you? Yes? I think so? Okay, good? So,
like I was saying, in nineteen twenty one, he was, uh,
he was given the task of studying meteor rights in
the Soviet Union, and so by the time seven rolls around,
he's got a pretty good knowledge bed that he's sleeping
on every night, right, so he makes his first uh,
(20:49):
he makes eventually three trips here to try and study things.
The first one unfortunately he didn't even find the site
because there was poor mapping going on. Uh. He was
really sort of um charting new territory, exploring this area,
and was just getting help from anyone he could. A
lot of people were scared to go there because of
(21:10):
you know, they thought it was a judgment from the gods. Yeah. Yeah,
so it was, Um, it was slow going, so that
that first expedition in nine was basically to just say, hey,
I think I know where this actually happened. Like that's
how rudimentary things were back then. Yeah, he um, he
(21:30):
I think was so was it the first expedition in seven,
he didn't make it in Did he also make it
the same year or was it a different year? Did
he also make it back there the same year? Yeah? Uh,
well I saw that he went in twenty seven nine, Okay,
so what whatever time he made it in there, he
made it in there at least once there one the
first time. And he knew like pretty much right off
(21:54):
the bat that he had had found the site because
all around there were trees that were laying on their sides,
but they were all pointing in the same direction, which
you just don't see very often, Yeah, for sure. And
then that you know, those at the center of those
trees standing straight up with with nothing there was another
pretty good indication. Yea. So the thing the thing about
(22:17):
Leonid Koolik is is that he um, he was very
very frustrated. Like again, he was a meteor hunter, like
this is his his thing. Um. So he fully expected
to find an impact crater and hopefully the meteorite that
that had all sorts of iron or whatever or um
it bore for him to go back and tell everybody about.
(22:39):
But he couldn't. He could not find this. Um. He
did find those trees standing upright at the center that
indicated that the reason they weren't blown over was because
the force had blown directly down on top of them.
So he knew he'd found the center, but there was
no sign of an impact crater. And he suspected that
there was a swamp in the south just south of
(23:03):
the um, the place where the trees still stood, that
was hiding the impact crater and the meteorite itself. And
I think that's kind of like what he He went
to his grave believing that he just could never find
it because the swamp had basically swallowed it up. Yeah, which,
you know, you can't blame the guy in the in
the nineteen twenties. It was a pretty decent idea because
(23:25):
he and again you know he had he had no
idea that, uh well, should we go ahead and say
what people think happened? Oh okay, alright, let's do it. Yeah,
he had no idea that a meteor could explode pre impact,
which is basically what most people think happened. Now. Yes, Yeah,
(23:45):
he died in a Nazi sorry, a Nazi prison camp
in World War Two. Uh so he would not have
been had the benefit of that knowledge that came later on.
I think starting in the fifties they started to really
suspect that. But at the time um when he came
back and said, this is definitely like, look at these pictures,
(24:06):
an explosion unlike the kind that we are even remotely
capable of creating here on Earth. So therefore a natural
explosion took place here. I have photographic evidence here. I've
interviewed locals who were there, so firsthand accounts of the experience.
I've documented all this stuff, and I cannot find the
(24:26):
meteorite or the impact crater. There's this sum total of
all the info that I can provide, and some people
took that and pieced it together to mean that, well,
maybe it was a comet impact then, because comets are
largely icy, they're rocky, and they have minerals and stuff
as well, but they're not like an asteroid or a
meteoroid where they're they're they're made mostly of rock or metal.
(24:48):
They're made mostly of ice. So when it does explode,
it would just kind of evaporate, and it might have
the same kind of impact, but it would also not
leave a crater or any real remnants of self behind.
So for a very long time and among some quarters
that still explains the Tunguska event that it was a
common impact rather than a meteor. Yeah, it's like that riddle, Yeah,
(25:11):
the one where the guys hanging and there's a puddle
of water. Q. Look, was like, there's a big puddle
of water here. Actually he thought the swamp swallowed it.
But uh, you know that didn't explain it. And you look,
I will say, like, although, like I feel bad for
the guy that he died. Uh, well, obviously he died
in prison camp. That's the worst thing, but that he
(25:32):
died not really getting to the bottom of this, but
he kind of kept that drumbeat going for people to
study this, took those great photographs, interviewed locals, and really
did a lot of the groundwork for other people later
to build on. Yeah, like if if he hadn't taken
this expedition on himself and really gone in and like
(25:55):
piece together the first bits of evidence we had fairly shortly.
I mean, what like this is ninety seven and the
thing happened in nineteen o eight, So within twenty years
he really went and documented it had enough and for
his work, we um we would probably not have like
any kind of anything like the understanding that we have today,
and who knows, it might have been lost to history
(26:15):
as well too, maybe, although I doubt it, because like
you can still see evidence of this today, which, uh,
it's pretty amazing. It is for sure, like the fact
that that that you can still find trees laying on
their sides, right or laying yeah, on the ground. Yeah,
I mean, like the forest is grown up around it,
but that stuff is still there sometimes, you know, in
some places. I would love to see that, yeah, of
(26:39):
course in prison. It's just I would definitely go in
the summer, but um so for those two weeks between
late June and mid July before winter sets in and
late July. And I should also say, yes, I just
saw it in the way back machine. But you know
what I mean, Yeah, and this was like, uh, it's
still not a populated area, so it's not like things
(27:00):
have built up around it. It's it's still largely the
same as it was back in. Yeah. There's a little
little little town called Vona Vara, and at the time
it was basically a trading post and it's not much
bigger now. It's really small. They have an airport which
is basically a strip of concrete that has been cleared,
(27:22):
and um, you can get in and out of it,
but it's it's it's not an easy place to get to.
It requires helicopters, horseback, some people ride reindeer in on
some of it. A lot of hiking. There's a lot
of bears, there's a lot of wolves. But the blast site,
the epicenter, is preserved in a nature preserve in Siberia,
(27:45):
so you could conceivably go study it, and people do.
I think the most recent expedition was in two thousand thirteen.
They're still trying to get to the bottom of it. Yeah,
and and Q look, I mean he he took every
available mode of transportation he could to get there over
I mean it took him days and days and days
over these expeditions to reach it. And he was he
(28:06):
was a brave dude and like very determined. So um
Culic found a couple of other things. He found that
the ground around the epicenter was actually um scrunched up
like a rug from the blast, which must have been
astounding to see on like a massive scale. But he
also saw that there were holes, really like strange circular
(28:30):
holes that were just a few yards deep, but up
to fifty or a hundred feet in diameter, and he
had no idea what he was looking at. He knew
that it must have something to do with the explosion,
but it's just peculiar. He hadn't seen those before. There
was nothing in the literature to explain what he was
looking at, and so some of the stuff that he
(28:51):
documented it was great documentation and he was a very
brave person for going and undertaking this this expedition. But
he also laid the groundwork for basically, um, everybody with
a theory to come along and suggest that their theory
was what explains the Tunguska event. And like you kind
of referred to earlier, some of them are kind of
(29:11):
out there. So let's take a little bit of break
and we're gonna come back and get into some explanations
for the Tunguska event, including the real one. All right, Charles,
(29:46):
you've heard of this before, right, So, like, did you
grow up with this was just one of the things
you're just aware of as a kid. No, it's you know,
something that became aware of with the Internet. I think
I heard about it from my time life Unsolved Streets books,
which just God bless those things. Those the the set
of those books, Um, the Uncle John's Bathroom Readers and
(30:10):
David Letterman Top ten Lists from the nineties book. Um,
probably are the three things that shaped my brain more
than anything else. Yeah. Yeah, it says a lot Mad
Magazine to you. Oh yeah, I can't forget Mad. Sorry,
thank you for for for saving me on that. Yeah.
Uh So here's some of the theories that have kind
(30:33):
of come and gone over the years. Uh. As we
said that Q looks was that it was this meteor
was swallowed up by the swamp south of the impact zone.
Other people suggested that it was like Chico in Italy
and that they were just off by their their mapping
(30:53):
skills were poor, and so this was the actual impact
creator and is now a lake. But now we think
that they just didn't draw maps well back then because
that wasn't on previous maps, and everyone's like, but now
it's here, so that's what it is, right right? Yeah?
But there, Yeah, like you're saying, I think is it
was just so remote and people weren't drawing maps of
it that it just hadn't been bothered to be put
(31:15):
on exactly, which I totally believe. Um, I think the comment,
I mean are there people that still believe it was
a comment? Yeah, Um, well, let me explain why there.
There have been surveys of the site that UM are
looking for traces of things that would be telltale signs
that it was definitely a meteor um. Like, there are
(31:38):
different kinds of meteors, but most meteors are either really
stony rocky that it's basically like a chunk of earth,
or it's like super metallic it's basically like a big
ball of metal or whatever. And there's like different It's
a spectrum, right, there's like you can fall anywhere in
between those totally rocky and totally metallic um. But the
(32:02):
the stuff aboard are going to be basically the same things.
It's just the company the concentration of them. But one
thing that you would find on like a meteorite is
something like a ridium or osmium. There are things you
would find in Earth, but you have to go to
the center of the Earth to find them. Uh, they're
not on the surface. So if you find those things
on the surface of Earth, it's strongly suggests that a
(32:24):
meteorite impacted Earth. Well, they've found not not much osmium
or a ridium around the Tunguskas site. So they think
that actually is kind of a thing that it suggests
that maybe actually it was a comet, because a comet
would have those things, but just not in high concentration,
(32:44):
because it would mostly be a big ball of ice.
So that's kind of kept the comet thing alive. Is
recently is just the last few years. Yeah, Well, they
did surveys in the fifties and they did find uh,
space dust is probably the best way to say it.
They did. It's true. Yeah, so, uh they found you
know what was extraterrestrial rock dust. Uh, they found it
(33:08):
in the area, They found it in the soil. Uh.
And again it does match the date of the event um.
So that to me means that the leading theory is
probably correct, which is that a meteor exploded about three
miles above land um, which basically just blew it to
dust and that's why there aren't huge, huge chunks of
(33:31):
rock laying everywhere. Yeah. So that's that's the predominant theory
right now, is that it was a meteor um that
blew up, like you said, I think something like half
a dozen miles over over the surface of the Earth
in the atmosphere, and it blew up so with such
force that not only did it, you know, cause the
(33:53):
ground to to buckle and bend and turn into like
a rug and blow eighty million trees down over a
couple a hundred square miles, it also just blew itself
and every any evidence of itself just into smith reeds,
into dust, and so that dust layer is the only
remnants of it left. Um. But the problem is that
(34:13):
they didn't know how that could happen. Like that's if
you put all the evidence together, that's the picture it painted.
But at the time, and until very recently, science was like,
we don't know how something like that would happen. It
seems like that is what happened, but how would that
even happen? Yeah, and it explains the fireball in the sky,
because that's what you would expect to see when a
(34:34):
meteor is is trucking towards the earth. Uh. This thing
was about a hundred and twenty feet or larger in diameter,
was going about thirty three thousand miles an hour. Uh,
and it was hot, like super super hot because of friction. Right.
So the thing this this huge rock, and they got
all those numbers just basically reverse engineering the force of
(34:56):
the explosion. Right, So that rock that's traveling so fast,
what did you say, like thirty four thousand miles an
hour or something like that. That's at thirty three but
give or take a thousand miles, all right, who cares?
At that point? Right when it hits the atmosphere, it's
suddenly met with that friction and gravity and drag and everything,
and that these forces acting on it all of a
sudden just destabilize it. And that the the pressure that's
(35:19):
building up at the front of this huge rock is
different by so much to the pressure behind it that
the differential just destabilizes this rock. And because it's traveling
so fast and has so much energy and there's so
much heat associated with it, it doesn't just break up.
It blows up. Yeah. What I'm surprised about it is
(35:39):
that this hasn't happened more, and it must just be
a very specific combination of size and speed and heat.
But I'm surprised that that doesn't happen more. That combination. Well,
some people are worried that it could happen more like
one of the predictions I saw as that Tungusca like
(36:02):
event we could expect it to happen over Earth maybe
once every hundred to three hundred years. Yeah, but we
haven't seen that. That hasn't played out right. No, But um,
some somebody who wrote an article I read pointed out
like the like, there's not some some schedule that that
that rocks follow when they're coming into Earth's atmosphere. This
(36:22):
is not how things work. So, um, we hope it's
like that, but it's it's probably much less predictable than that.
And we actually did a survey called UM Projects Space
Guard I think, where we surveyed all of the near
Earth rocks, the big ones, and we found that none
of the big ones are probably going to come near
us anytime soon. But we found also that we had
(36:44):
trouble seeing the small ones, and the small ones could
still create like a Tunguska event, which I mean, like
you said, it happened over a pretty depopulated area and
it's still affected humans. If it happened over a like
a city, a major city, it would be just lights
out for that that entire city. So the chances are
(37:05):
pretty low that it would happen over a populated area
just by you know, virtue of the fact that we
tend to populate in in dense clusters while leaving also
huge portions of the Earth, especially the oceans, unpopulated. Where
but if it did happen over over a populated area,
(37:25):
it would be really really bad. Yeah. I mean they
make movies about, like fictional movies about that stuff, right exactly.
So hopefully it doesn't happen, but it could, is the point. Yes,
And I always wonder, like, man, I'm surprised that it
hasn't happened over like a big city, But like you
said that, it's we always think like others just people everywhere,
(37:48):
but that's that's not the case. Uh, well, like how
our settlements are. Yeah, like when you think about how
large the Earth is compared to where the people are,
it's we're we're we're we're not everywhere. Water is everywhere, right,
that's true. So there there. I think in two thousand thirteen, Chuck,
(38:10):
there was the Cheliabinsk meteor. Do you remember that over Russia?
M M. I don't remember that. There was a like
it was very well documented because everybody has a video
tape camera on their cell phone these days, and um,
there was a meteor that that basically did the same
thing into Tunguska, except it was far, far smaller. It
(38:32):
was something like, um, two thousand times more powerful than
than Hiroshima. Now that doesn't sound right, thirty times more powerful.
I'm sorry. Well, Tunguska was up to two thousand times
more powerful. But it like blew the windows out of places,
that knocked people down, and it really caught people's attention,
saying like, hey, everybody, this is a real thing that
(38:54):
that that like this can happen, and if a huge
one happens over a population center, then we will be
in trouble. So I think it kind of caught the
attention of the scientific community that like, this is something
we need to keep an eye on. Literally, Yeah for sure, Yeah,
hopefully we will. I'm glad it's not up to me. Ah,
(39:16):
you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well,
if you want to know more about the Tunguska event,
type that word in the search bar of your favorite
search engine and it will bring up all sorts of
interesting stuff. And since I said that, it's time for
a listener mail, I'm gonna call this letter from a teacher.
We love these. Hey guys, am writing to thank you
(39:36):
for helping you teach my ap psychology course. I have
a degree in history and had taught just United States
history and world history up until last year, but I
wanted to thank you guys for helping me teach my
own class. Needless to say, I have a lot of
self teaching to do in order to prepare, and years
of listening to stuff you should know has prepared me
(39:58):
in a way that I was not expecting. As I
taught the class, I found myself referencing knowledge I picked
up from you guys, including how to train a pigeon,
Stockholm syndrome, Oh mommy interesting, and the effects of bath
salts on the brain. It also seemed to me, uh,
it also seemed at least once a class, I would
utter the words I listened to this podcast once and
(40:21):
then dive into something like feral children and how that
gives insight into development, or how a social panic works.
Even got a few students to listen, just a few
nice Thank you for that. All that's to say, thank
you so much for what you guys do. You've given
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(40:43):
Jacobs from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and he came and saw us
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and he said, Josh, you actually ran into my sister
on the street right before the show. I ran into
a few people at St. Louis like more than usual,
and everybody was super friendly. Well, this was Samantha, So
(41:03):
we're giving her a shout out. Hey, Samantha, So Samantha
Michael Michael's sister. Thank all you guys and ladies for
the sport. Yeah, thank you everybody who came out to
that show. And actually all of our shows, you guys
are really we appreciate all of you for it. Um.
Actually you can come out to our other shows. We've
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(41:23):
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Podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on
(41:46):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
the trio known as Stuff you Should Know the trio.
(00:23):
Mm hmm, Jerry came to our live show. I know,
I'm still a little giddy and um in amazement. It's
been a while, Jaars. I mean, I know it's not personal,
but I just remember she used to actually go on
tour with us where she got a family before she
(00:46):
checked out. Yeah, other people more than nuts. I'd also
like to point out the um fact that Jerry is
writhing and discomfort right now, Chuck. Yeah, you're really sticking
a tour. No, she's fine. Um, well, it was a
great show, probably because Jerry was there and everybody, well,
(01:08):
I guess you would have heard it by now because
these are coming out after Christmas. Time Warp. Let's do
the time warp dance, Chuck, and everybody's like, gee, she
would be nice to see some of the things you're
talking about. What you can do maybe next year you
mean in person? Yeah, if you want to do another
(01:28):
live Christmas show, sure, Yeah, I'm done with that. I mean,
we paid money for Christmas decorations. We did not to
feel like we need to reuse those. YEA, hopefully everybody
has heard it already and now they're like, yes, I
know exactly what these guys are talking about, and I'm
enjoying this horribly awkward intro diversion. It's not awkward. Speaking
(01:50):
of intro divergence, Chuck, I want to mention two things. Okay, Um,
you know, the Stuff Network has a ton of really
good shows and there's one that I was on recently
called Behind the Bastards. I was on a two parter.
It was it was nice. So Robert Evans is the host,
(02:12):
and he basically just does tons of research about some
of the worst human beings who have ever lived, many
of whom are celebrated in some quarters, and he just
kind of tears him down to size. Did you do
a show on me? No, you're just celebrated. There's no
tearing you down. I'm sure people tear me down. I
don't care. The ones that I sat in on were, Um,
(02:33):
we're based on scientific racism, history of scientific racism and
how it's been used to justify like colonialism and all
sorts of stuff and the level of of research this
cat does is astounding. Yeah, it's a good show. It is.
It's a great show. So, um, I was on that.
But that's a good maybe a good primer, but really
(02:54):
any behind the Bastards would be a great place to start. Yeah,
the show was was a and I don't want to
say some surprising success because Robert's awesome, but um, I
think everyone was just like, wow, look at this thing,
Look at him, go, look at him. Go. And we've
got another news show actually from our pals that stuff
to blow your mind. Joe and Robert. Yes, they just
(03:17):
launched a show called Invention. I don't remember if they
went with the exclamation point or not, but it's just
awesome because I think no, but that boy, their album
art is so cool. It's it's really great. It's just
a cool maze where you're just waiting for a minuteur
to leap out. Yeah. And for the people that are
like album art, what are you talking about? Did they
(03:37):
record an lp uh little industry lingo everybody, the little
icons that you see on your podcast players, it's called
album art in the industry for some reason. Yeah, I
still haven't figured that one out. I think it's just
a hold over from um iTunes days, I guess, But
(03:57):
like what, it would be funny if they called it
like the single art, that would be pretty funny. Actually,
still never bought a single in my life. Oh I have.
I don't remember what they were, but I have. So anyway,
go check out Invention. You're gonna love it. If you're
a stuff to blow your mind fan, it's Joe and
(04:18):
Robert doing their thing but on different topics, you're just
gonna love it. And then if you're not a stuff
to blow your mind fan, well you're welcome for introducing
YouTube to awesome podcasts at once. Yeah, those guys are great. Ye.
So uh okay, let's talk about our own thing. Okay,
let's do our own stuff. Yeah, what about us? So
(04:39):
we're talking, let's get in the way back machine, and
we need to put on our high temperature protective suits
that we used to hang out on volcanoes sometimes. Well,
and also our low temperature protective suits are in the back.
They are we don't need them for this one. Well,
(05:00):
what day are we going to We're going to June eight,
so sure, it's probably about seventies seventy degrees actually early
in the morning. We're going to get there around around
seven am to give ourselves some time to get set up.
But seven am on June thirtieth, nineteen o eight in
the Russian wilderness around the Pudka Manya Tungusca, which means
(05:25):
the stony Tunguska River. Um, it was probably about fifty degrees,
Will say, okay, yeah, which is I mean that is
like choice summertime weather for the Siberian Plateau. Yeah, and
this place is gorgeous. So the stony Tunguska River is
a nice, wide, meandering, slow river, and it's name stony
(05:46):
because the bottom is all beautiful pebbles and it just
kind of its banks are not really well defined. It
just kind of goes into the land and swamp land
and then suddenly the land rises upward into ridges with
huge all evergreens everywhere. It's just gorgeous. I love it here.
You know what we call those rocks in the South
(06:07):
skipping rocks. They are skipping rocks. They call them that
in Russia too. Oh really yeah, Skivinski rocks. Emily the
other day was like, I wish I could skip rocks,
and I was like, dude, you just gotta get the
right rocks. That's really the key. I mean, this show,
there's techniques in the wrist and everything, but it really
(06:28):
is the rock. Although so there are people who can
skip just about any rock you handem well that I'm
a pretty good skipper, but you still need those good, little, smooth,
little river rocks. It's true. It makes it way easier
for sure. So in this beautiful place, I also failed
to mention there's lots of reindeer wandering around and they're
not wild. They're actually being herded by the Evenki people
(06:49):
also known as the toong goose Um, who are basically
nomadic reindeer herders that live in the area. Yeah, these
are working deer, right. So everything's pretty idyllic and sweet
and nice. It's the Siberian summer. And then all of
a sudden, there's a streak of cloud across the sky,
(07:10):
a fireball at the tip. It looks like about a spear,
and then all of a sudden, this is seven seventeen
am local time, all of a sudden, that fireball disappears,
and then a huge flash of light explodes in the sky.
And that's followed very quickly by a huge burst of heat,
(07:30):
and then after that is followed by a huge shock wave,
and a massive explosion has just taken place, the likes
of which have never been seen in recorded human history. Yeah,
where are we? Are We dead now? No, we're in
our protective bubble. Since we're actually visiting from another time,
we're still in this time. We're just kind of visiting
(07:52):
as in like a movie. I have never really quite
wrapped my head around the physics of it. But we're safe.
We're not dead now. If Jerry killed us while we
were paying attention to um, the Tungusco blast in this life,
we would be dead. Yeah. When you talk about explosions, um,
this was depending on where you look, Uh, it was
(08:15):
something in the order of a hundred to one thousand
times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. I did
the math. I saw two hundred to two thousand times
more powerful. Yeah. Man, this that's the thing. When you're
talking about explosions in night. Sure it's gonna be arranged,
but the thing is, the Hiroshima bomb was fifteen killo
(08:35):
tons fifteen thousand tons of t NT yield. Yeah, it
was a big explosion, so much so and we'll get
to more details, but supposedly you could see the light
from this thing as far away as London. Yeah, there
was a lot of worldwide effects that happened from it. Yeah,
so the Hiroshima woman was fifteen kilo tons. This is
(08:58):
an estimated three to third mega tons, million tons of
t n T. Just an astoundingly greater explosive force, and
it just happened out of the blue, literally out of
the clear blue sky on this day, on June nineteen
o eight. Yep, that's right. And uh, thankfully it's not
(09:21):
a very populated area, but there there are people there,
and there are you know, native tribes people that make
their way there and they live in huts and they
raised those reindeer, and while there weren't a lot of
people there, it created Uh, it was. It was an
awful thing if you lived in the area. Some people
(09:42):
died of of shock and heart attacks, reindeer died, huts
were leveled. It really kind of wiped out the way
of life for these people. Yeah, yeah, big time, because
I mean, like, if you live in Siberia, you're spending
your summer like preparing for the winter, and this blast
like just leveled their supplies, the deer, the reindeer that
they depend on. It like had a huge impact on
(10:03):
them and some people some some people did die, although
I think um, no one died directly like being blown
to bits by the blast. It was like, um, elderly
people had heart attacks and things like that. Yeah, And
it ended up it was a very interesting pattern that
emerged here. So these trees were flattened out in a
(10:24):
radial pattern that pointed away from the center of this
explosion over an area this was about like close to
seven seventy five square miles. Oh my god, which is
a huge, huge explosion. Uh. There were trees that remains standing,
and this is really interesting, but there were no branches,
no leaves, no uh, no needles or anything. They were
(10:48):
just basically the the stem and the trunk of the
trees bear standing straight up. Yeah. And that that was
Those trees were right in the middle of the blast,
the radio blast pat Yeah. And the fact that they
were basically just stripped bear means that it was a
very huge but super fast impact that blasted all those
(11:10):
branches off without affecting the tree itself. Yeah. So the
this this blast, this explosion is very hot, fast, explosion
actually lit the trees on fire from the temperature that
formed the leading edge of the explosion, and then the
shock wave that followed that moved the air actually put
the fire out, so they were like flash charred and
(11:31):
then immediately extinguished. Yeah, there's one quote here from uh,
I mean because this was there's not a lot of
direct accounts, but they do have a few, and we'll
talk about how in a minute. But this is one
hot wind blew past us the ground and all the
huts trembled, causing the sod packing to fall from the ceilings.
(11:53):
The glass was blasted out of the window frames. Scary moment. Yeah, yeah, no,
I can't even imagine. Supposedly, the um the Evenki people
believed that their god ug Dy who is I think
the god of either lightning or fire or thunder one
of those. Um. I've seen different accounts of it. Um,
(12:16):
they that they assumed. So imagine this like you're the
only people that you're the only people are used some
reindeer hurting tribes people who live in the area. Um,
and this happens and you have no scientific frame of
reference for it, and UM, you believe your god came
to punish you wipe out all of your stores and
all of your reindeer and everything, and then that's just
(12:36):
what you had to live with. Because you were in
such a remote area. No one knew about this. No
one knew that this happened for a very long time, actually,
Like I think some of the local papers began to
report it by the end of the summer, but the
larger world had had no real ideal what had happened,
even though there were effects worldwide, but no one could
(12:59):
no one traced it back to this this moment in
Siberia for decades, at least a full decade I think
actually too. Yeah, And it wasn't like, uh, it wasn't
like the scientific community just descended upon this place ever,
really like they've and we'll talk about some of the
superstars of uh, particularly this one man that went and investigated.
(13:22):
But uh, I mean that's one of the reasons that
we still don't know exactly what happened. We have a
pretty good idea, which will say for later, but there
aren't Uh. This was a singular event. It's not the
kind of thing that we could say, well, this is
like that other thing that happened right exactly, Yes, yeah, Yeah,
it's it's there's nothing like although they they think that
(13:44):
there was at least one other thing that happened like
it in the twentie century. Um. Actually now to two
things have happened that are similar to it. So we're
kind of dancing around it a little bit. Um. But
let me tell you, let me point out one thing
that has happened. Even though this is considered far and
(14:04):
away the largest cosmic I guess explosion that you that
that we we have ever recorded, there was something else
that happened in Brazil in nineteen thirty near the Crusa.
I think I'm saying that right river um where there
was a very similar event, huge explosion in the sky
(14:25):
um scared the Bejesus out of the indigenous tribes living there,
burned a significant portion of the Amazon for a full month.
Um And there was a Jesuit missionary who um came
along five days after and got a lot of firsthand
accounts from that one. But they think it was similar
but much smaller than Tunguska. Yeah. And and the mystery
(14:49):
of this whole thing has led to some weird theories
that will hit on later that are I mean some
of them of course, just like aliens and beasts and
things like that, which is the we obviously no, that's
not the case, but it still remains somewhat of a
mystery after you know, a hundred plus years right um.
And then so there's one other that this was an
(15:11):
unrecorded history as far as we consider recorded history typically,
but there there's evidence that this happened one other time
and then this time people weren't so lucky. At something
like about thirty years ago around the Dead Sea um
there was a large area I think about five hundred
(15:33):
square kilometers wide, which is a pretty significant amount of
land that was just wiped bear of of life, including
humans living in the area at the time, and that
it was an explosion from the sky and it wiped
out one village in particular called tall l Hammam And
get this, chuck, you know what Tall l hamm was
(15:55):
also called at this time thirty years ago. Saw them
that interesting. So they think that this is where the
legend of sodom being wiped out comes from. That it
was actually an explosion much like Tungusca. And they found
shards of um like pottery from the time that the
outsides have been turned to glass some of the particles
(16:18):
inside have been gasified. And for this to have happened
without like doing anything more to the to the pottery
means that it happened like in an instant, and that
the air temperature was suddenly about four thousand degrees fahrenheit.
And the other thing that happened too, and this I
think also kind of bolstered the Sodom legend, was that
(16:38):
um a lot of the dead sea salts were pushed
across the land, um over this huge amount of land
and took like what was once fertile and turned it
into like dead sterile land because it was salted, and
it took something like six years for the area to
recover from that. In that fascinating let's take a break,
(16:59):
because so I think you can tell him getting a
little worked up here. All right, Well we'll be right back,
everybody with more amazing nous, alright, dude. So from the outset,
(17:33):
some scientific minded types were like, well, I'm hearing reports
of this this weird event that happened in eight in Tunguska,
the Tungusca area, and it sounds to me a lot
like a meteorite. So I'm gonna go check out you know,
the whole thing and try to find this meteorite. Yeah,
I mean that was one of the early theories. Uh.
(17:54):
There were seismographs that did register some activity, so some
people thought it was an earthquake at first. Uh. It
lit up the sky um and created this massive dust plume.
So that's where people in like London and Germany. Um,
they said that they could read newspapers at midnight even
that far away. So it was it was causing a
(18:16):
little bit of commotion in the scientific community. Uh. And
still you know, consider this as was eight. Um. It's
hard for a word to get around, so you can
hardly blame people with you know, this event happened kind
of in the middle of nowhere in nineteen o eight,
and it didn't exactly like you know, shake the world.
But there was one man, uh and this was uh,
(18:37):
this was later on. His name was Leonid Kulick, and
he was He was a scientist. He had a pretty
interesting life and career. Um. He was born in eighteen
eighty three in Estonia, which was later part of the
Soviet Union. He studied math and he studied science. He
fought in both World War One and World War Two,
(18:58):
which is really interesting because I'm curious about the number
of people who were unfortunate enough to experience both those wars. Yeah,
there were probably a lot, not a ton. I mean,
if you do the math, like, you would have had
to have been pretty young and then pretty old to
have fought in both of these. Um. But in nineteen
(19:21):
uh one he had the task of examining meteorites within
the Soviet Union. And that's where I got the impression
that the first sort of a scientific fire was lit
under his his butt to uh to get into studying meteorites. Yeah, well, no,
he was already studying meteorites, and he heard some he
read some of those local press clippings that had had
(19:44):
been written like ten, ten or twelve years before, and
that that he kind of put piece together like, oh,
this sounds a lot like a meteorite impact. My job
is already to go fine meteorites because they you know,
when they strike the ground, they have all of this
rich interroal or with them. So I'm gonna go find
it and um the government can come mind it, and
(20:05):
that's my job. So he if if Leonig Kulik had
not bred some of these accounts and then traveled to
the area. Um, we would probably not have anywhere near
the kind of um understanding or awareness of them the
impact that we have today. Yeah. So was that the
(20:29):
sinct enough for you? Yes? I think so? Okay, good? So,
like I was saying, in nineteen twenty one, he was, uh,
he was given the task of studying meteor rights in
the Soviet Union, and so by the time seven rolls around,
he's got a pretty good knowledge bed that he's sleeping
on every night, right, so he makes his first uh,
(20:49):
he makes eventually three trips here to try and study things.
The first one unfortunately he didn't even find the site
because there was poor mapping going on. Uh. He was
really sort of um charting new territory, exploring this area,
and was just getting help from anyone he could. A
lot of people were scared to go there because of
(21:10):
you know, they thought it was a judgment from the gods. Yeah. Yeah,
so it was, Um, it was slow going, so that
that first expedition in nine was basically to just say, hey,
I think I know where this actually happened. Like that's
how rudimentary things were back then. Yeah, he um, he
(21:30):
I think was so was it the first expedition in seven,
he didn't make it in Did he also make it
the same year or was it a different year? Did
he also make it back there the same year? Yeah? Uh,
well I saw that he went in twenty seven nine, Okay,
so what whatever time he made it in there, he
made it in there at least once there one the
first time. And he knew like pretty much right off
(21:54):
the bat that he had had found the site because
all around there were trees that were laying on their sides,
but they were all pointing in the same direction, which
you just don't see very often, Yeah, for sure. And
then that you know, those at the center of those
trees standing straight up with with nothing there was another
pretty good indication. Yea. So the thing the thing about
(22:17):
Leonid Koolik is is that he um, he was very
very frustrated. Like again, he was a meteor hunter, like
this is his his thing. Um. So he fully expected
to find an impact crater and hopefully the meteorite that
that had all sorts of iron or whatever or um
it bore for him to go back and tell everybody about.
(22:39):
But he couldn't. He could not find this. Um. He
did find those trees standing upright at the center that
indicated that the reason they weren't blown over was because
the force had blown directly down on top of them.
So he knew he'd found the center, but there was
no sign of an impact crater. And he suspected that
there was a swamp in the south just south of
(23:03):
the um, the place where the trees still stood, that
was hiding the impact crater and the meteorite itself. And
I think that's kind of like what he He went
to his grave believing that he just could never find
it because the swamp had basically swallowed it up. Yeah, which,
you know, you can't blame the guy in the in
the nineteen twenties. It was a pretty decent idea because
(23:25):
he and again you know he had he had no
idea that, uh well, should we go ahead and say
what people think happened? Oh okay, alright, let's do it. Yeah,
he had no idea that a meteor could explode pre impact,
which is basically what most people think happened. Now. Yes, Yeah,
(23:45):
he died in a Nazi sorry, a Nazi prison camp
in World War Two. Uh so he would not have
been had the benefit of that knowledge that came later on.
I think starting in the fifties they started to really
suspect that. But at the time um when he came
back and said, this is definitely like, look at these pictures,
(24:06):
an explosion unlike the kind that we are even remotely
capable of creating here on Earth. So therefore a natural
explosion took place here. I have photographic evidence here. I've
interviewed locals who were there, so firsthand accounts of the experience.
I've documented all this stuff, and I cannot find the
(24:26):
meteorite or the impact crater. There's this sum total of
all the info that I can provide, and some people
took that and pieced it together to mean that, well,
maybe it was a comet impact then, because comets are
largely icy, they're rocky, and they have minerals and stuff
as well, but they're not like an asteroid or a
meteoroid where they're they're they're made mostly of rock or metal.
(24:48):
They're made mostly of ice. So when it does explode,
it would just kind of evaporate, and it might have
the same kind of impact, but it would also not
leave a crater or any real remnants of self behind.
So for a very long time and among some quarters
that still explains the Tunguska event that it was a
common impact rather than a meteor. Yeah, it's like that riddle, Yeah,
(25:11):
the one where the guys hanging and there's a puddle
of water. Q. Look, was like, there's a big puddle
of water here. Actually he thought the swamp swallowed it.
But uh, you know that didn't explain it. And you look,
I will say, like, although, like I feel bad for
the guy that he died. Uh, well, obviously he died
in prison camp. That's the worst thing, but that he
(25:32):
died not really getting to the bottom of this, but
he kind of kept that drumbeat going for people to
study this, took those great photographs, interviewed locals, and really
did a lot of the groundwork for other people later
to build on. Yeah, like if if he hadn't taken
this expedition on himself and really gone in and like
(25:55):
piece together the first bits of evidence we had fairly shortly.
I mean, what like this is ninety seven and the
thing happened in nineteen o eight, So within twenty years
he really went and documented it had enough and for
his work, we um we would probably not have like
any kind of anything like the understanding that we have today,
and who knows, it might have been lost to history
(26:15):
as well too, maybe, although I doubt it, because like
you can still see evidence of this today, which, uh,
it's pretty amazing. It is for sure, like the fact
that that that you can still find trees laying on
their sides, right or laying yeah, on the ground. Yeah,
I mean, like the forest is grown up around it,
but that stuff is still there sometimes, you know, in
some places. I would love to see that, yeah, of
(26:39):
course in prison. It's just I would definitely go in
the summer, but um so for those two weeks between
late June and mid July before winter sets in and
late July. And I should also say, yes, I just
saw it in the way back machine. But you know
what I mean, Yeah, and this was like, uh, it's
still not a populated area, so it's not like things
(27:00):
have built up around it. It's it's still largely the
same as it was back in. Yeah. There's a little
little little town called Vona Vara, and at the time
it was basically a trading post and it's not much
bigger now. It's really small. They have an airport which
is basically a strip of concrete that has been cleared,
(27:22):
and um, you can get in and out of it,
but it's it's it's not an easy place to get to.
It requires helicopters, horseback, some people ride reindeer in on
some of it. A lot of hiking. There's a lot
of bears, there's a lot of wolves. But the blast site,
the epicenter, is preserved in a nature preserve in Siberia,
(27:45):
so you could conceivably go study it, and people do.
I think the most recent expedition was in two thousand thirteen.
They're still trying to get to the bottom of it. Yeah,
and and Q look, I mean he he took every
available mode of transportation he could to get there over
I mean it took him days and days and days
over these expeditions to reach it. And he was he
(28:06):
was a brave dude and like very determined. So um
Culic found a couple of other things. He found that
the ground around the epicenter was actually um scrunched up
like a rug from the blast, which must have been
astounding to see on like a massive scale. But he
also saw that there were holes, really like strange circular
(28:30):
holes that were just a few yards deep, but up
to fifty or a hundred feet in diameter, and he
had no idea what he was looking at. He knew
that it must have something to do with the explosion,
but it's just peculiar. He hadn't seen those before. There
was nothing in the literature to explain what he was
looking at, and so some of the stuff that he
(28:51):
documented it was great documentation and he was a very
brave person for going and undertaking this this expedition. But
he also laid the groundwork for basically, um, everybody with
a theory to come along and suggest that their theory
was what explains the Tunguska event. And like you kind
of referred to earlier, some of them are kind of
(29:11):
out there. So let's take a little bit of break
and we're gonna come back and get into some explanations
for the Tunguska event, including the real one. All right, Charles,
(29:46):
you've heard of this before, right, So, like, did you
grow up with this was just one of the things
you're just aware of as a kid. No, it's you know,
something that became aware of with the Internet. I think
I heard about it from my time life Unsolved Streets books,
which just God bless those things. Those the the set
of those books, Um, the Uncle John's Bathroom Readers and
(30:10):
David Letterman Top ten Lists from the nineties book. Um,
probably are the three things that shaped my brain more
than anything else. Yeah. Yeah, it says a lot Mad
Magazine to you. Oh yeah, I can't forget Mad. Sorry,
thank you for for for saving me on that. Yeah.
Uh So here's some of the theories that have kind
(30:33):
of come and gone over the years. Uh. As we
said that Q looks was that it was this meteor
was swallowed up by the swamp south of the impact zone.
Other people suggested that it was like Chico in Italy
and that they were just off by their their mapping
(30:53):
skills were poor, and so this was the actual impact
creator and is now a lake. But now we think
that they just didn't draw maps well back then because
that wasn't on previous maps, and everyone's like, but now
it's here, so that's what it is, right right? Yeah?
But there, Yeah, like you're saying, I think is it
was just so remote and people weren't drawing maps of
it that it just hadn't been bothered to be put
(31:15):
on exactly, which I totally believe. Um, I think the comment,
I mean are there people that still believe it was
a comment? Yeah, Um, well, let me explain why there.
There have been surveys of the site that UM are
looking for traces of things that would be telltale signs
that it was definitely a meteor um. Like, there are
(31:38):
different kinds of meteors, but most meteors are either really
stony rocky that it's basically like a chunk of earth,
or it's like super metallic it's basically like a big
ball of metal or whatever. And there's like different It's
a spectrum, right, there's like you can fall anywhere in
between those totally rocky and totally metallic um. But the
(32:02):
the stuff aboard are going to be basically the same things.
It's just the company the concentration of them. But one
thing that you would find on like a meteorite is
something like a ridium or osmium. There are things you
would find in Earth, but you have to go to
the center of the Earth to find them. Uh, they're
not on the surface. So if you find those things
on the surface of Earth, it's strongly suggests that a
(32:24):
meteorite impacted Earth. Well, they've found not not much osmium
or a ridium around the Tunguskas site. So they think
that actually is kind of a thing that it suggests
that maybe actually it was a comet, because a comet
would have those things, but just not in high concentration,
(32:44):
because it would mostly be a big ball of ice.
So that's kind of kept the comet thing alive. Is
recently is just the last few years. Yeah, Well, they
did surveys in the fifties and they did find uh,
space dust is probably the best way to say it.
They did. It's true. Yeah, so, uh they found you
know what was extraterrestrial rock dust. Uh, they found it
(33:08):
in the area, They found it in the soil. Uh.
And again it does match the date of the event um.
So that to me means that the leading theory is
probably correct, which is that a meteor exploded about three
miles above land um, which basically just blew it to
dust and that's why there aren't huge, huge chunks of
(33:31):
rock laying everywhere. Yeah. So that's that's the predominant theory
right now, is that it was a meteor um that
blew up, like you said, I think something like half
a dozen miles over over the surface of the Earth
in the atmosphere, and it blew up so with such
force that not only did it, you know, cause the
(33:53):
ground to to buckle and bend and turn into like
a rug and blow eighty million trees down over a
couple a hundred square miles, it also just blew itself
and every any evidence of itself just into smith reeds,
into dust, and so that dust layer is the only
remnants of it left. Um. But the problem is that
(34:13):
they didn't know how that could happen. Like that's if
you put all the evidence together, that's the picture it painted.
But at the time, and until very recently, science was like,
we don't know how something like that would happen. It
seems like that is what happened, but how would that
even happen? Yeah, and it explains the fireball in the sky,
because that's what you would expect to see when a
(34:34):
meteor is is trucking towards the earth. Uh. This thing
was about a hundred and twenty feet or larger in diameter,
was going about thirty three thousand miles an hour. Uh,
and it was hot, like super super hot because of friction. Right.
So the thing this this huge rock, and they got
all those numbers just basically reverse engineering the force of
(34:56):
the explosion. Right, So that rock that's traveling so fast,
what did you say, like thirty four thousand miles an
hour or something like that. That's at thirty three but
give or take a thousand miles, all right, who cares?
At that point? Right when it hits the atmosphere, it's
suddenly met with that friction and gravity and drag and everything,
and that these forces acting on it all of a
sudden just destabilize it. And that the the pressure that's
(35:19):
building up at the front of this huge rock is
different by so much to the pressure behind it that
the differential just destabilizes this rock. And because it's traveling
so fast and has so much energy and there's so
much heat associated with it, it doesn't just break up.
It blows up. Yeah. What I'm surprised about it is
(35:39):
that this hasn't happened more, and it must just be
a very specific combination of size and speed and heat.
But I'm surprised that that doesn't happen more. That combination. Well,
some people are worried that it could happen more like
one of the predictions I saw as that Tungusca like
(36:02):
event we could expect it to happen over Earth maybe
once every hundred to three hundred years. Yeah, but we
haven't seen that. That hasn't played out right. No, But um,
some somebody who wrote an article I read pointed out
like the like, there's not some some schedule that that
that rocks follow when they're coming into Earth's atmosphere. This
(36:22):
is not how things work. So, um, we hope it's
like that, but it's it's probably much less predictable than that.
And we actually did a survey called UM Projects Space
Guard I think, where we surveyed all of the near
Earth rocks, the big ones, and we found that none
of the big ones are probably going to come near
us anytime soon. But we found also that we had
(36:44):
trouble seeing the small ones, and the small ones could
still create like a Tunguska event, which I mean, like
you said, it happened over a pretty depopulated area and
it's still affected humans. If it happened over a like
a city, a major city, it would be just lights
out for that that entire city. So the chances are
(37:05):
pretty low that it would happen over a populated area
just by you know, virtue of the fact that we
tend to populate in in dense clusters while leaving also
huge portions of the Earth, especially the oceans, unpopulated. Where
but if it did happen over over a populated area,
(37:25):
it would be really really bad. Yeah. I mean they
make movies about, like fictional movies about that stuff, right exactly.
So hopefully it doesn't happen, but it could, is the point. Yes,
And I always wonder, like, man, I'm surprised that it
hasn't happened over like a big city, But like you
said that, it's we always think like others just people everywhere,
(37:48):
but that's that's not the case. Uh, well, like how
our settlements are. Yeah, like when you think about how
large the Earth is compared to where the people are,
it's we're we're we're we're not everywhere. Water is everywhere, right,
that's true. So there there. I think in two thousand thirteen, Chuck,
(38:10):
there was the Cheliabinsk meteor. Do you remember that over Russia?
M M. I don't remember that. There was a like
it was very well documented because everybody has a video
tape camera on their cell phone these days, and um,
there was a meteor that that basically did the same
thing into Tunguska, except it was far, far smaller. It
(38:32):
was something like, um, two thousand times more powerful than
than Hiroshima. Now that doesn't sound right, thirty times more powerful.
I'm sorry. Well, Tunguska was up to two thousand times
more powerful. But it like blew the windows out of places,
that knocked people down, and it really caught people's attention,
saying like, hey, everybody, this is a real thing that
(38:54):
that that like this can happen, and if a huge
one happens over a population center, then we will be
in trouble. So I think it kind of caught the
attention of the scientific community that like, this is something
we need to keep an eye on. Literally, Yeah for sure, Yeah,
hopefully we will. I'm glad it's not up to me. Ah,
(39:16):
you got anything else? I got nothing else? All right, Well,
if you want to know more about the Tunguska event,
type that word in the search bar of your favorite
search engine and it will bring up all sorts of
interesting stuff. And since I said that, it's time for
a listener mail, I'm gonna call this letter from a teacher.
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(39:36):
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a degree in history and had taught just United States
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own class. Needless to say, I have a lot of
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(40:21):
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gives insight into development, or how a social panic works.
Even got a few students to listen, just a few
nice Thank you for that. All that's to say, thank
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(40:43):
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(41:03):
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Actually you can come out to our other shows. We've
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(41:23):
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And if you want to get in touch with this,
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