Morning of 30 June 1908, over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, Siberia: the largest impact airburst in recorded history flattened ~2,150 km² of forest — roughly 80 million trees — and left no crater. This panel is runnable: enter a body’s size, density and speed; the engine returns its kinetic energy in megatons and Hiroshimas, and proves the airburst by the one fact the site insists on — there is no hole in the ground.
source The Tunguska event, 30 June 1908, Siberia; L. Kulik’s 1927 expedition; modern airburst modelling (energy estimates span ~3–30 MT). Room: THE WEIRD. Rendered, not quoted.
At about 07:17 local time a fireball crossed the Siberian sky and detonated over the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Trees were felled radially outward across ~2,150 km²; at the epicentre they were left standing but stripped. Herders ~60 km away were knocked off their feet.
Civil war and remoteness delayed science. In 1927 the mineralogist Leonid Kulik reached the site expecting a meteorite and a crater. He found the flattened forest — and no crater, no fragment. That absence is the whole puzzle.
Treat the body as a stony sphere, diameter ~50–60 m, density ~2200 kg/m³, entering at ~15–27 km/s. Its mass is ~2.5×108 kg and its kinetic energy KE = ½ m v² lands near 5×1016 J ≈ 12 MT.
Studies span 3–30 MT depending on the assumed size, speed and composition — the centre engine is the same formula, run live. 1 MT = 4.184×1015 J. Energy goes as v²: double the speed, quadruple the blast.
The Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons = 0.015 MT. So 12 MT is roughly 800× Hiroshima; across the 3–30 MT range that is ~200 to ~2000 Hiroshimas.
It arrived over empty taiga. The same burst over a city would have destroyed it outright — the reason Tunguska is the founding case study of planetary defence.
Set the impactor. The engine computes mass from a sphere, kinetic energy from ½ m v², converts to megatons and Hiroshimas, scales the flattened area as E2/3, and asks the deciding question: does this leave a crater?
Energy scales as v² — same body, three plausible entry speeds:
| speed | energy (MT) | × Hiroshima |
|---|
Flattened area scales as E2/3 (anchored: 12 MT → 2,150 km²): —
| model | predicts crater | observed at site | ok |
|---|
Deposit that energy at altitude and the shock front flattens forest over a wide radius while the body ablates and disrupts ~5–10 km up — no ground contact, no crater. The absence Kulik found in 1927 is not a missing clue; it is the answer.
Why it matters. Tunguska is the calibration point for planetary defence: a body far too small to see coming, delivering a city-killer with no impact site to warn us. Detection, not deflection, is the hard part.
Antimatter meteor. Dead. An antimatter chunk would annihilate high in the atmosphere and leave a gamma / isotope signature never found; the energy and tree-fall fit ordinary chemistry-free kinetics.
A mini black hole through the Earth. Dead. It would have punched an exit blast in the North Atlantic — none recorded — and the mechanics do not match a single air shock.
Tesla’s death-ray / a crashed UFO reactor. Dead. No device, no wreckage, no radiation; folklore, not physics.
Standing: a stony (or cometary) asteroid airburst at ~10–15 MT — consensus, and the only model that predicts exactly no crater. LIT
The red move: replace the airburst model with a ground-impact crater model. The same energy now demands a hole in the ground — a transient crater of order ~1 km — that Tunguska does not have.
Switch to the crater model and the witness (5) compares its predicted crater to what the site actually shows — none. The prediction is off by a kilometre, and the witness turns red. The airburst is required precisely because there is no crater.