Wednesday, June 30
Dürer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who, as far as I know, have not been blamed for the Tunguska Event, but probably would have thought it was, like, really groovy, dude.
Itinerant Black Holes, Another Fine Name for a Rock Band
Today, in addition to being the feast fof the Protomartyrs of the Roman Church is, in the bizarre news department, the 96th anniversary of the so-called Tunguska Event of 1908. At 7:17 AM of that morning, something, as bright as the sun, fell in the Podkamennaya Tunguska river valley of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, causing an explosion sixty times greater than the atom bomb that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. This is approximately equal to 500 kilotons of TNT. Seismic waves were reported in Irkutsk, Tashkent, Tbilisi, Jena and even London.
No crater was found.
The blast, which occurred eight miles in the air over the river, was felt over fifty miles away, incinerating reindeer and causing many surviving animals to break out in strange scabs. Clouds and light from the event could be seen at five hundred miles distance. 60 million trees were felled in a blast zone of 2,150 square kilometers. Radioactivity levels soared, while later research indicated the shock wave from the impact had circled the earth twice. One eyewitness stated that he "saw the sky in the north open to the ground and fire poured out," something verging on the apocalyptic. Another reported, in more detail:
I was sitting on the porch of the house at the trading station, looking north. Suddenly in the north...the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire. I felt a great heat, as if my shirt had caught fire... At that moment there was a bang in the sky, and a mighty crash... I was thrown twenty feet from the porch and lost consciousness for a moment... The crash was followed by a noise like stones falling from the sky, or guns firing. The earth trembled... At the moment when the sky opened, a hot wind, as if from a cannon, blew past the huts from the north. It damaged the onion plants. Later, we found that many panes in the windows had been blown out and the iron hasp in the barn door had been broken.Exactly what led to all this is still unknown. Lights, bright twilights and solar haloes had been witnessed across Europe in the days leading to the blast, and decreased shortly afterwards. Theories have suggested alien spacecraft, electromagnetism, a comet, a large glob of antimatter, a sixty-meter-wide meteorite made either of rock or "mirror matter," a techtono-atmospheric phenomenon (a "geophysical meteor"), solar plasmoids, or an itinerant black hole. One suggestion, most spectacularly, blames it on real-life mad scientist Nikola Tesla. I suppose we'll never know, until the little green men show up and take responsibility for this cosmic hit-and-run. I suggest we sue for damages.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
