GREAT METEOR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 July 1938, Page 7

GREAT METEOR

CRASH INTO SIBERIAN FOREST SHOCK ROUND THE WORLD. SCIENTIST VISITS AREA. The fascinating story of how a great meteor, or a large body of meteoric substance, crashed into a Siberian forest 30 years ago, is told by Dr Waterfield in his “Hundred years of Astronomy.” Had that meteor fallen on London, he says, it is probable that not a building would have escaped destruction and not a person, unless perhaps in the extreme outer suburbs, would have remained to tell the tale. On the night of June 30th, 1908, and on the next few nights there was visible in England after sunset a strange pink luminosity of the sky which persisted through the short hours of darkness into the dawn, writes Dr Waterfield. It was suggested at the time that the cause of the’ phenomenon was a volcanic eruption, for somewhat similar appearances had been noticed all over the world after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. But when the days, the ■weeks and finally the years went by without any news of an eruption or an earthquake people began to forget. It was not until twenty years later rumour began to percolate into Russia that something unusual had happened several years earlier in Central Siberia. An intensely brilliant object had been seen rushing across the sky in full daylight, violent explosions had been heard and sudden winds and hot blasts of air had been felt —such were the bits of information which travellers from Krasnoyarsk had picked up from natives living in the country round.

In 1921 Dr L. A. Kulik, of the Academy of Sciences at Leningrad, set out to investigate the rumours at first hand. He went to the neighbourhood of Krasnoyarsk and spoke with many of the people who 'had witnessed something of the phenomenon themselves or who had heard about it from eye-witnesses. The sudden blast of wind had in some cases been sufficiently strong to fell horses to the ground and throw people off their feet although the site of the explosion was believed to be over one hundred miles further north.

Curious waves flowing upstream in the rivers had been noticed, and those who had seen the flaming body said it was bluish-white in colour. But there was other information related to Dr Kulik at second hand; for natives coming from the sparsely inhabited regions some five hundred miles northeast of Krasnoyarsk told of the widespread destruction of reindeer and the uprooting of large tracts of forest. In 1927 a second expedition was sent out under the leadership of Dr Kulik. After a journey of three months, made mostly by rafts along small rivers, he finally reached the area of devastation which lay in the midst of a marshy forest. For a distance of nearly forty miles surrounding the centre of this area trees were uprooted and lying on the ground; within a radius of twenty miles of the centre the uprooting had spared scarcely a single tree. The trees within the devastated area were scorched as by a great heat. But the strangest matter of all was that all the trees lay with their tops directed away from the centre of the area. Looking at them from near at hand one saw endless rows of trees with trunks parallel to one another; looking down on them from one of the small hills in the vicinity one saw that they radiated outwards from a centre like the ribs of’ an umbrella. Moreover, in the swamp among the fallen trees were numbers of holes full of water up to fifty yards in diameter. Dr Kulik visited the place again in 1928 and 1929, and on this last occasion spent nearly two years investigating the phenomenon. The results show that the devastation took place about 6 a.m. (a quarter of an hour after Greenwich midnight) on June 30, 1908. It was a warm sunny morning without a colud in the sky; and those who heard only the thunder commented upon it on that account. The body must have been intensely bright; for two witnesses who were at least thirty miles from the meteor when it passed them felt it. Other witnesses at greater distances compared the brightness of the body with that of the sun. One native had previously used the devastated area as a pasture for his reindeer and had built there many sheds in which he kept various implements and clothing. Shortly after the great explosion, when he visited his camp, every was burned up and melted to pieces; and of only a few of the reindeer were the charred carcases discovered. Thus there can be no doubt that the blazing body, or meteor, was the direct cause of the devastation.

In spite of most careful searching Dr Kulik was never able to find any definite meteorites or meteoric fragments either in the “shell holes” or on the ground around. It is possible that the meteor consisted of a dense swarm of small particles which were mostly vaporised before reaching the ground. It was also probably very large; judging from the descriptions of those who saw it pass in the sky at a great distance and compared it in size with the sun and moon, its diameter must have been of the order of a mile and possibly a good deal larger. As it hit the ground the compressed and superheated mass of air and meteoric vapours would have escaped sideways in all directions flattening out and scorching the forest for miles around. It might well be that any meteoric particles that were not vaporised were blown by the immediate re-expansion of the air to great heights in the atmosphere. That might explain the failure to find any meteoric material in the neighbourhood, also the luminous phenomena seen all over Europe on the following nights, so similar to the appearance caused by the high-blown dust from Krakatoa. It was thought at one time that this meteor was a part of Pons-Winnecke’s comet, whose orbit we were very close

to at that time. But Dr Crommelin has pointed out that the meteor, which all agree travelled from south to north, was moving in exactly the opposite direction to that required by such a theory. The apparently very large velocity of the meteor suggests that it was moving in a hyperbolic orbit and so was not a member of the solar system but came from outer space.

It .is fortunate that this meteorite landed where it did. In a populated region it would have done appalling damage. The force of the impact and explosion was terrific, eighty million trees were uprooted; the noise of the explosion was heard over six hundred miles away; the earth tremor due to the impact was recorded as far off as Jena in Germany; and, as Dr Whipple has shown the pulse produced by the sudden compression and re-expansion of the air recorded itself on numerous barographs in England. Fortunately such events are excessively rare, quite unexpected and all over in an instant. Apart from the Siberian meteorite of 1908 and the Arizona meteorite of several thousand years ago, we know definitely of only four other events that are at all comparable.