The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball

One hundred years ago today—on June 30, 1908—a meteoroid or comment fragment exploded over the remote Tunguska region of Russia, unleashing an amount of energy estimated to be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the conclusion of World War II. This was the largest known impact event in modern times. Scientists (and governments) are now working on asteroid deflection strategies in case of a future Tunguska-like event.

On the forty-second page of “The Mystery of the Tunguska Fireball” author Surendra Verma wrote (emphasis added):

Figure 6: The forest of 'telegraph poles' as seen by Kulik. (Photo by I.M. Suslov, Moscow, 1928.)

There was another remarkable feature: within the central blasted area was a ring of upright trees, completely stripped of foliage. The fact that they had remained upright while all trees outside the ring had been flattened, Kulik thought, marked some kind of node or region of rest where air waves cancelled each other.

There was also the evidence of fire; some of the trees were charred, but this evidence of burning was unusual: in a forest fire, trees are usually burnt on the lower part of their trunks, but these had been burnt uniformly and continuously. Kulik believed that a great rush of hot air produced by the change of kinetic energy into heat energy when the meteorite crashed into the Earth blew the trees down and scorched them.

In some areas Kulik also found forest growth about twenty years old. 'From our observation point no sign of

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