Almost a century after a mysterious explosion in Russia flattened a huge swath of Siberian forest, scientists have found what they believe is a crater made by the cosmic object that made the blast.
The crater was discovered under a lake near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in western Siberia, where the cataclysm, known as the Tunguska event, took place. In their new study, a team of Italian scientists used acoustic imagery to investigate the bottom of Lake Cheko. The basin of Lake Cheko is not circular, deep, and steep like a typical impact crater. nstead it's elongated and shallow, about 1,640 feet (500 meters) long with a maximum depth of only 165 feet. "We suggest that a 10-meter-wide [33-foot-wide] fragment of the object escaped the explosion and kept going in the same direction. It was relatively slow, about 1 kilometer a second [0.6 mile a second]," said Luca Gasperini, a geologist with the Marine Science Institute in Bologna .
The crater was discovered under a lake near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in western Siberia, where the cataclysm, known as the Tunguska event, took place. In their new study, a team of Italian scientists used acoustic imagery to investigate the bottom of Lake Cheko. The basin of Lake Cheko is not circular, deep, and steep like a typical impact crater. nstead it's elongated and shallow, about 1,640 feet (500 meters) long with a maximum depth of only 165 feet. "We suggest that a 10-meter-wide [33-foot-wide] fragment of the object escaped the explosion and kept going in the same direction. It was relatively slow, about 1 kilometer a second [0.6 mile a second]," said Luca Gasperini, a geologist with the Marine Science Institute in Bologna .
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4 comments:
Cool! I remember reading about the Tunguska event as a child (it was being listed as a possible UFO crash of all things!). Very interesting. Good to see a mystery being cracked.
Your link doesn't work though, the "l" at the "html" seems to have beem cut off, bringong up an error message. It was a very easy search to find the article at Nat. Geo. though.
Wolfkahn
Wow, never noticed! lol the top link worked (article title) but I have repaired the other link. Thanks for the heads up!
Gasparini is the one who's "relatively slow." :) contemporary eyewitness accounts show that Lake Cheko was there long before the Tunguska Event.
Check out: http://www.vurdalak.com/askjack/askjack_q06.htm
You know, I have to look a bit askance of anyone who can't even get their basic facts straight in the first few sentences. DR Jack starts off by saying that there were over a thousand square miles flattened. Ummm wrong.
The best estimates I have found are between 750 to 850 square miles. Now granted he states nearly....but off by almost 300 square miles...
Now Dr. Jack is working from a space com article. The article
here is the National Geographic, and Jack states that they said the lake was round. Wrong again. Here is what the NG said
The basin of Lake Cheko is not circular, deep, and steep like a typical impact crater, the scientists say.
Instead it's elongated and shallow, about 1,640 feet (500 meters) long with a maximum depth of only 165 feet
And on and on. I think some people just want to see zebra here. No one is saying that there wasn't an air blast. The researchers are just saying that part of the object did not disintegrate and plowed into the soft earth at about
300 miles an hour scraping out a shallow grove. There were no eye witness to the fact that there was a lake there before...however earlier Russian research noting the average sedimentation rate calculated that the lake had to be over 1000 years old. The Italian researchers noted that only the last meter of sediment seems to be natural and at the given rate that makes the lake again only 100 years old.
But a meteor or a comet is not as glamorous as a black hole or a other world space ship. I just think Occam applies here. Material from our own solar system or ftl
space ship from another planet.
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