Tunguska comet impact in Siberia created a mini end of the world event
Fallen trees at Tunguska, 1927. This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain in Russia.
On June 30, 1908, a 330-foot comet or meteoroid exploded over the Tunguska River in Siberia, Russia. The 10 to 15 megatons of TNT explosion felled an estimated 80 million trees.
I’ve been researching historical “end of the world” scenarios for my End of the World 2012 Movie. The Tunguska event is the largest comet impact in recorded human history. The shock wave of the blast would likely have registered 5 on the Richter Scale.
If this explosion had occurred over a large metropolitan area, the city would have been destroyed.
Nonetheless, native tribespeople the Evensk, and Russian settlers, who lived in the area, reported seeing a column of light, almost as bright as the sun, moving across the sky accompanied by a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses said that:
The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometres away.
