Event in Siberia

In 1908, the "Tunguska Event" devastated 830 square miles of a remote area of Siberia.  The "event," an explosion over a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, knocked down 80 million trees and broke windows hundreds of miles from the epicenter.

When I was young, I heard many possible explanations for the "event," including flying saucer activities, a collision between matter and anti-matter, or a tiny black hole passing through the earth. 

Today, it's almost universally agreed that the "event" was the result of a meteor or asteroid entering the atmosphere and exploding.  This hypothesis was not accepted at first; the explosion was so great and yet left no evidence of meteorite material on the ground.  It's now estimated that the object, over 300 feet in diameter, exploded at an altitude of three to six miles, the fragments burning and vaporizing before they could hit the ground.

Today's blast over Siberia (is Siberia a meteor-magnet?) was a firecracker by comparison.  According to the Associated Press, the object was about the size of a bus, and exploded with the force of about 20 Hiroshima bombs.  Furthermore, its life ended much higher above the ground -- somewhere from 12 to 32 miles, according to varying American and Russian estimates, shielding the ground to a large degree from the force of the explosion.

Very interesting scientifically, but unnerving.  Fortunately there were no fatalities.  But it reminds us how precarious not only our individual lives may be, but the existence of life on Earth itself.  The dinosaurs took a red card 66 million years ago when the earth was hit by an asteroid massive enough (six to nine miles in diameter) to survive the atmosphere and actually strike the Earth near the Yucatan, releasing energy of over one billion (yes, billion) equivalents to the Hiroshima bomb. 

It could happen again.  The Tunguska Event was a reminder, and today's little fireworks display was just another prompt.  Most of the thousand people injured were folks -- many of them school kids -- who ran to their windows to see what was happening when they saw a flash brighter than the Sun.   They arrived at the window just in time for the blast to arrive, shattering the window and piercing them with glass.

Too bad they didn't display the instinctive reaction of my own generation.  When I was a kid, if our schoolroom had been hit by a blinding flash of light from outside the window, we would each have dropped to the floor under our desk, circled one arm around our face, and thrown the other across the back of our neck. 

Waiting with hearts pounding for the end of civilization as we knew it.