The Tunguska Explosion

As every high school yearbook from the era can attest, "What the Hell Was That??" was the catchphrase of the year for 1908 in Russia, thanks to the infamous Tunguska Explosion in Siberia earlier that year, which rocked the fallacious common notion that an entire forest wouldn't suddenly just blow up for no apparent reason. Exactly that happened to 2,000 square kilometers (10,000 miles) of forest on a remote central Siberian plateau on June 30th, at 7:14 am. Some historians argue that it was actually at 7:13 am, but researchers have independently verified that every one of them, to a man, is an asshole.

So what the hell was that, exactly? Ask a hundred different people and you'll get seven different answers, and ninety-three people who look at you like you just crawled up out of a manhole naked. In truth, they're all wrong, unless you ask the question while participating in a Gay Pride parade and really are naked on the street. But that's obviously never happened to anyone so let's drop the subject and never bring it up again, regardless of any "Griswald Dreck Gone Wild" photos you might have seen circulating on the Internet.

Let's start with what we know. That morning began like many others, with simple Siberian farmers and herdsmen going about their regular business, planning a communist revolution. Some commented it was strange that they couldn't hear any birds singing that morning, but were quickly reminded that all the birds had been shot for treason. Then suddenly, without warning except for the fact that all the animals and insane people in Russia began digging like mad in unison, a huge fireball brighter than the sun erupted from the earth, incinerating everything within miles of ground zero, including a herd of reindeer who had come into work on their day off. Traders 60 kilometers (14,000 miles) away saw the fireball shoot high into the sky, felt intense heat, and then heard a deafening explosion fifteen minutes later. The noise later turned out to be an unrelated event, when a local herdsman conducting scientific experiments attempted to boil a bathtub full of gasoline. But few could deny it added to the drama.

30 kilometers (9.7 miles) away huts were flattened, pigs were eaten by wolves and Russians were knocked the fuck off their couches. Forest fires burned for weeks afterward in the region until the locals got tired of the rich, soothing campfire aroma and decided to put them out. Unfortunately, the preferred firefighting method of the day was to drop napalm from a plane and run like hell, waiting for the trees and the fire to duke it out in a battle royale of natural forces, so due to this an additional 1,500 square kilometers (6 miles) of forest were lost.

Tremors from the impact were recorded over 5,000 kilometers (87 feet) away at a meeting of tremor enthusiasts in Jena, Germany, and noctilucent "night-shining" clouds were seen all over Europe for weeks after the event. Repeated requests for an encore by excited Europeans annoyed Russia for years, and led indirectly to the start of WWI a few years later.

The Russian government finally got around to investigating the explosion in 1927, after years of complaints that Siberia smelled like burnt reindeer meat. Conventional wisdom said that the Tunguska event was the work of a giant asteroid hitting the earth, so that was obviously wrong. Scientists were unable to find any evidence of an asteroid in the region, except for the fact that everything was flattened like it was hit by a giant asteroid or something. Neither the months of half-hearted looking around nor the posted 1 million ruble ($14) reward for anyone returning the 100,000 ton asteroid believed responsible turned up any tangible evidence.

Since then, numerous theories have been developed by scientists and the bored to explain the Tunguska event. As with any mysterious event, it's much easier to determine what didn't happen than what actually did, and these theories are a wonderful overview of what didn't happen. Just to rankle the scientists who supported the asteroid theory, some others argued that it must have been a comet instead, which would explain the lack of debris since comets rarely stick around and wait for the cops to show up. The first group of scientists countered that it couldn't have been a comet, because comets are gay, and so it had to have been a stony asteroid that disintegrated before reaching the ground, commonly known as a Houdini. The second group of scientists thought that sounded made up.

Scientists who were snubbed for inclusion on either the asteroid or comet teams formed their own club out of spite, centered around the idea that the explosion was actually caused by a chunk of antimatter, or even better, an anti-chunk of matter. Everyone agreed that was definitely made up, but it was ruled admissible as long as the third group of scientists agreed both that Houdinis were real and that comets definitely weren't at all gay. After that, everyone was happy.

That was, until the mysterious superstar astronomer Carl Duck appeared briefly from his Haight-Ashbury lair in 1968 to announce that the "Tunguska thing" was all about a black hole, dig? Most of the other scientists of the day agreed that Duck was a really cool guy and if he said it was a black hole, then 'nuff said.

Unfortunately, more would still be said on the subject. During the 1970's, when restrictions on who could be quoted as a "scientist" were relaxed to help out news organizations, all kinds of new theories came out of the woodwork. One of the more popular ideas was that the nuclear engine of a Martian spaceship had blown up over Siberia that morning, probably one based on Ford Pinto technology. Another competing theory had it that the blast was the effect of a laser shot from extraterrestrial civilization trying to contact Earth, though none could explain how a race sophisticated enough to build a powerful interstellar laser could be that stupid. Scientists hoped that if this theory were true, with any luck the extraterrestrial race would not prove to be too friendly, as a couple more calls on the bomb phone could spell the end of life on Earth.

But enough with the theories, Dreck, you demand, what really happened that day in Siberia?

Two words, faithful readers: Nitroglycerine fertilizer.

Due to a quirk in the Russian alphabet, the words for "nitrogen" and "nitroglycerine" look almost identical, enough to fool a generation of Siberian farmers into turning that region into one giant, growing bomb in the early 1900's. They learned a tough lesson that day in 1908, as much as you can learn anything when you're vaporized into a mist of carbon dust that catches on fire after some asshole drops a lit cigarette out of his blimp. But, as the president says, learning's overrated.

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