Impact on the Environment of the Tunguska Explosion

Abstract

The Tunguska explosion occurred on June 30, 1908 over Siberia. It was a cosmic body explosion that was accompanied by an energy release equivalent to 10 megatons of TNT. The Tunguska explosion is often used as a kind of standard of destructive action. Due to the lack of comparable events, its impact on the environment is identified with the effect of nuclear explosions. However, the impact of the Tunguska explosion on the environment was very specific. The energy released during this explosion went mainly into the formation of a blast wave, and not into heat and radiation. The blast wave was so powerful that it broke windows in houses at a distance of up to 500 km from the epicenter and went around the globe. And the radiation of the explosion was so weak that trees at the epicenter remained alive. Several hundred surviving trees were found at a distance of less than 7 km from the epicenter. According to estimates made on the basis of damage to vegetation near the epicenter, the radiation energy of the Tunguska explosion was ~1% of total energy, provided that the explosion occurred at an altitude of 5 - 10 km above the epicenter. There is an assumption that in the Tunguska catastrophe we are dealing with an explosion of the cloud of a disintegrated comet, that is to say, the explosion was volumetric.