Wait, what?

This may or may not be old news to the rest of the you, but I just recently discovered that roughly 100 years ago, the Earth got bitchsmacked by a massive meteor. On June 30th, 1908 in what is now known as Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, a meteor that was estimated around “tens of meters” wide exploded 3-6 miles above land. To put this whole fiasco into perspective, I bring to light two facts. One, the area of devastation, 830 square miles, is about the same size as New York City. Two, the impact was as powerful as  1,000 atomic bombs or 1/3 the power of the strongest nuclear bomb ever created (the Tsar Bomba).

The odd thing is, this whole thing didn’t really seem out of the ordinary for anyone. Most people just described the event to reporters and moved on. Perhaps if it would have caused any fatalities, there would have been of a mass-hysteria going on. I would imagine that something of this magnitude would have generated some curiosity, but the first expedition to the site didn’t occur until almost a decade after the impact.

It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theorists to crawl out of the woodwork. As recent as 2006, there are suggestions that the Tunguska Event was any, or a combination of the following: End of the World, a blackhole, a UFO crash, a natural H-Bomb, weapon experiment by the Russian government, the destruction of anti-matter, and…the sudden release and explosion of 10 million cubic yards of natural gas.

There is also strong evidence that argues Lake Cheko was created by a 1 meter fragment of the Tunguska meteor which resulted in the creation of the eight kilometer in diameter lake. You read that right. A 1 meter fragment created a hole 8 kilometers in diameter. Even crazier? If the meteor had struck exactly 4 hours, 47 minutes earlier it would have wiped out St. Petersburg (Imperial Russia’s capital). I don’t know who figured that shit out, but it is crazy nonetheless.

80 million tress were flattened by the Tunguska event.

While I think it would be cool to witness a none End-of-the-World meteor strike, I’d like to take this opportunity to let Xanadu know that I would prefer not to. And I’ll begin praying to Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck just in case one heads our way, which according to NASA, will happen in 2029 but will “most likely miss Earth.” Comforting.

-Chad 2