To
this day, no one knows for sure.
At first, most scientists assumed that a giant
meteorite had crashed that summer morning in the trackless wastes of
Central Siberia. That hypothesis stood unchallenged for the nearly two
decades that separated the Event itself from the first on-site investigation
of it — two decades during which scientific inquiry had languished
in Russia, preempted by war, revolution, and socio-economic upheaval.
The few expeditions that did set forth in the intervening years were
forced to turn back when their Evenki guides refused to enter the blast
zone, now declared taboo.
Finally, in 1927, a team of researchers headed
by mineralogist Leonid Kulik reached the site of the impact, where the
surrounding hills cupped the pestilential sloughs of the Great Swamp
to form a landscape Kulik dubbed “The Cauldron.” The Epicenter
itself was easy enough to identify: All around the Cauldron, across
an area half the size of the state of Rhode Island, the ancient forests
of the taiga had been scorched and flattened by the blast.
Hundreds of thousands of trees had been toppled like matchsticks in
all directions, forming a radial “throw-down” pattern in
the shape of a gigantic target, with the impact site at the bulls-eye.
But, in reaching ground zero at last, Kulik
had dealt a death blow to the meteorite hypothesis he himself championed.
For there was no crater.
With a yield estimated in the tens of megatons
— thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped
decades later on Hiroshima — the explosion should have gouged
a hole in the earth’s crust to dwarf the mile-wide, 500-foot-deep
Great Barringer Crater in Arizona. Instead, what Kulik found at the
very center of the blast pattern was a peat marsh contorted into a nightmare
landscape. “The solid ground,” he wrote, “heaved outward
from the spot in giant waves, like waves in water,” as if stressed
by some unimaginable force.
With on-site observations all but ruling out
the meteorite-impact hypothesis, the Tunguska Event became fair game
for ever more bizarre conjectures: The collision of the earth with fragments
of a comet? A solar plasmoid ejected by the sun? The crash of a nuclear-powered
alien spaceship? A chunk of infalling antimatter?
But perhaps most outlandish of all was the explanation
concocted some six and a half decades after the event, by two young astrophysicists
at the University of Texas in Austin. Writing in the September 14, 1973 issue of
Nature, Albert A. Jackson, IV and Michael P. Ryan, Jr. had the audacity
to theorize that what had struck the earth in June 1908 was a remnant of the Big Bang.
That the bizarre circumstances of the impact all pointed to a cause that could only
have been engendered in the unimaginable heat and pressure attending the birth of
the universe itself.
— That the Tunguska Event was nothing less than a
collision between the earth and a submicroscopic black hole. |
