At the beginning of the 20th century, an
asteroid the size of the White House was
moving past Earth on its way to nowhere
in particular. But as it had done for
billions of years, with a billion other
space rocks, our earth reached out and
began pulling it toward us. Best guesses
put that asteroid at between 30 and 50
meters across. If you had to walk all the
way around it it would have taken you
about eight minutes. For months, it
continued toward us, gaining speed. By the
time it hit our atmospherem it was doing
at least 40,000 kilometers per hour... but
probably a lot more. At that speed and
size, it pierced our atmosphere. It was
moving so fast that the air became an
impenetrable wall. The massive meteor
smashed into this wall of air and
exploded like a hydrogen bomb. Imagine
what that would have looked like from
the ground.
The debris cloud from the Tunguska event
eventually destroyed an area over 2,000
square kilometers of forest. That's an
area as large as the City of London. It's
estimated that an event as large as Tunguska
happens roughly every 500 years
It WILL happen again.
