On This Day in History: June 30

The Tunguska Event

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It was a very big explodey-pow. A colossal boom-shakalakalaka. Cue the dinosaurs: “You call that a meteor? Well, when I was a kid . . .” But those T. rexes couldn’t write shit down because tiny arms and tiny brains, which is why the Tunguska meteor is the largest impact event in Earth’s recorded history. And precise details for just how much of an Earth-shattering kaboom it made are not known, because it was June 30, 1908, in the middle of butt-ass nowhere. Part of the reason for all the guessing is that the location is so remote it took 19 years for a scientific expedition to assess the site. Since then many estimates have been made, and at the low end the explosive force was akin to 200 Hiroshima bombs, but others think it might have been as powerful as 2,000 said war atrocities. And that’s a helluva non-nuclear detonation for something that was only (guessing time again) between 160 to 620 feet in diameter.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 30, 1908--

But the meteor never actually hit the ground.

Just like our modern-day city-destroying intercontinental boomsticks are designed to devastate and irradiate via airbursts, the Tunguska meteor came screaming toward Earth at over 30,000 miles per hour, and that high speed coupled with entering the atmosphere superheated the chunk of rock to the point where it finally ended its interplanetary journey with a massive fuck-you-I’m-done, self-annihilating kerblooie at a height of just under what modern jetliners fly.

Then, shock wave.

The 1927 scientific expedition had trouble getting locals to talk about it, because they saw it as a religious event, a godly punishment for . . . something. Cuz God was like “Fuck you, trees.” That’s what mostly happened: 80 million trees were flattened over an area of about 830 square miles. Of course, a lot of critters died too. And it’s alleged three people as well, but there is no proof of that. 

One witness said of the event, “The whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire . . . The earth trembled.” He was 40 miles away and felt like his skin was burning. When the shockwave hit, he was thrown several feet. It broke windows hundreds of miles away and was measured via seismic instruments in Western Europe. Night skies across Asia and Europe glowed for days.

If you can anthropomorphize an asteroid, there may be one out there watching, waiting, and saying, “If you keep fucking things up, Ima comin’.”

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