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00:29For centuries, the scriptures have pictured the end of the world
00:54coming in a gigantic fireball from the sky.
00:57But astronomers now realize there are good scientific reasons for such ideas.
01:05Here in one of the remotest places on Earth, scientists hope to find vital clues to a cosmic
01:11mystery that might help prevent the extinction of the human race.
01:22On June 30, 1908, the unconcerned inhabitants of Varnavara, Siberia, began their day as usual.
01:32Then, at 716, far up the Tunguska River, something was to happen which would change their lives forever.
01:41I don't know.
01:49I don't know.
01:53I don't know.
01:57I don't know.
02:07I don't know.
02:09I don't know.
02:13Tunguska was the largest and most baffling of Earth's encounters with a cosmic object
02:40in living memory.
02:43A blinding fireball was first seen in the sky a thousand kilometers away and by over 800
02:48eyewitnesses.
02:49For the first time, survivors and their descendants describe the event on television.
02:55Mom asked to crawl up in the stairs.
02:57Poor pig she was falling out.
02:58Soft dim.
02:59In the basement she sat down and averting the blood within an antediction70.
03:01Now she my mother went through to будstak with a cuerpo or a bird
03:02and shattered Heroes.
03:04She had a sound when an antediction point came out, he collapsed.
03:05And the sound made out of the window and pulled away from the inn.
03:09After drop a photograph from the infancy of the mother's building of the In thy感染 bind
03:10of Mother's building.
03:11He went out of the bedroom, threw him out of the air in the air, and sat on the knees and pray for his dad.
03:21What it was, they didn't know.
03:24The windows of the windows were blown away.
03:29The sound went out of the air.
03:32They just got out of the air.
03:35The mystery object seemed to have struck the forest 70 kilometers north of Vanavara.
03:55Despite being only seven years old at the time,
03:58Grigory Verkaturov, now 96, still remembers the event in extraordinary detail.
04:05We were in the water, we were in the water, we were there, we were in the water.
04:13We were in the air, the sun had to fall, the sky was in the air, the sun had to fall.
04:25The windows were moving, the snow had to fall, the windows were spinning.
04:31They were walking down to the air.
04:35They also look at what happened, what happened, what happened, what happened, what happened.
04:42No one knew what happened, no one knew.
05:05Far out in the forest, much closer to the epicenter, lived many Evenks, Siberian nomads.
05:13Petrified, they blamed the gods. For the Evenks, Agdi is the god of thunder, a bird that brings fire.
05:21They believed he'd shown his anger that day.
05:35The sky was red. The sky was red. The sky was red.
05:43The sky was red. The fire was red. The sky was red.
05:54If we look at the earliest records of mankind,
05:58we find that the ancient peoples speak about natural disasters.
06:03They even describe impact events.
06:07You either accept that your ancestors were a bunch of loonies and imagined things in the sky,
06:14or you posit the possibility that they had very rational reasons for believing the sky was catastrophic.
06:22What happened, Agdi has the wind.
06:25I would imagine there is the wind coming by Claudius.
06:29From asia, she looked bananas.
06:30We wanted to do this, but then to the wind came down and gloved again.
06:32And how did them burst this?
06:34What happened, lorsqu'il was the wind Onlykid
06:39and they all shoot.
06:44Then they go and they also go and catch them.
06:47And the old ones, the old ones,
06:51wear their clothes.
06:54We are all dressed,
06:56we are dressed.
06:59We were worried.
07:01We thought, what's going on,
07:03will happen in black light.
07:06and they went from this place and went to the place.
07:13The earth-shaking Tunguska event laid flat 2,000 square kilometres of forest,
07:19incinerated thousands of reindeer, vaporized many Evenk homes,
07:23and even rattled vodka bottles 1,500 kilometres away.
07:28It was soon entombed in a mystifying silence that was to last for almost 20 years.
07:34While the rest of Russia went through the years of revolution and war,
07:38Vanavara's only connection to the outside world was its river,
07:42frozen for nine months of the year.
07:48We have recently become aware that there is a hazard
07:51due to the impact of the comets and asteroids.
07:54Part of our understanding of that hazard
07:56comes from looking at the event 65 million years ago,
08:00where a really large impact led to the extinction of the dinosaurs,
08:04in fact, of most creatures on earth.
08:06But within the historical records,
08:08Tunguska is the only such event.
08:11It's the only thing we can point to and study directly,
08:15where a large object struck the earth.
08:17Indeed, if it hadn't been for Tunguska,
08:19we might not be aware today that there's an impact hazard at all.
08:23We need to understand exactly what happened there.
08:35Was it an asteroid? Was it a comet?
08:37How fast was it coming in? How did it detonate?
08:40What debris did it leave behind, if any?
08:43We need to do that in order to build up a total understanding
08:46of the cosmic shooting gallery which the earth happens to move through.
08:51The Tunguska event could have been caused by many culprits.
08:55The nearest source of lethal objects circulating close to earth
08:59is the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
09:03Asteroids are usually dense blocks of rock and iron,
09:07but vulnerable to impacts with other bodies,
09:10they can be knocked on to a collision course with earth.
09:16Some asteroids have been so heavily impacted
09:18that they've become loosely bound together
09:21as they head towards earth at speeds of 50,000 miles an hour.
09:35But the Tunguska object could have travelled
09:37from beyond the outer reaches of the solar system.
09:42Wildcard comets can come hurtling at us three times faster than asteroids.
09:48Apart from having a volatile, gassy nucleus and tail,
09:52like Halley's comet here,
09:53comets are less dense than asteroids.
09:56More like icy, gaseous dust balls than solid lumps of rock,
10:01comets travel at speeds of 150,000 miles an hour
10:05and can cause massive craters when they strike the earth.
10:10The strange thing about Tunguska
10:13that excited people for a long time was
10:18big effect, no crater.
10:22The Tunguska effect had been far greater
10:24than any eyewitness could have imagined.
10:27Signals of seismic activity had been picked up by the Irkutsk station,
10:31a thousand kilometres away, and by many others
10:34right across the European landmass.
10:40Intrigued Russian researchers found a shockwave
10:42had spread steadily out from the Tunguska region.
10:46At the speed of a passenger jet aircraft,
10:48it had reached as far as Britain and beyond.
10:51People were amazed to find that on the night of June the 30th,
10:54the sky was so light and luminous they could take photographs
10:58and even read newspapers long after midnight.
11:01There was also evidence of an atmospheric pressure wave
11:05that had travelled twice around the planet.
11:09But it was to take nearly 20 years for the Tunguska mystery
11:13to find its first detective.
11:15An expert on meteorites from St. Petersburg,
11:18Leonid Kulik developed an obsession to try and find the epicentre.
11:24After months of dogged research,
11:26Kulik identified the small trading post of Vanavara
11:30as the nearest settlement to the epicentre.
11:33Here he found eyewitnesses who told him
11:35the secret lay with the Irvenk people.
11:40At first they were taciturn and hostile about the blast zone.
11:44For them it had become a sacred place of fear.
11:47But Kulik was helped by a man named Semyonov,
11:54who himself had been knocked unconscious by the blast.
11:58Together they managed to persuade an event guide,
12:00called Luchikan, to help mount an expedition
12:04to locate the place where the meteorite might be found.
12:07But uncertain how far away the epicentre might lie,
12:18Kulik had to equip a small army of support staff.
12:24Kulik's ambition was fired by the dream of discovering a meteor crater
12:29something like the size of the one that had just been discovered in the Arizona desert.
12:38Once the spring thaw came, the expedition set out
12:42on the difficult journey up the stony Tunguska River.
12:45On one occasion, Kulik was almost swept away and drowned.
12:54After 16 days, he found something totally unexpected.
12:59Mile after mile of trees felled in a curious radial pattern,
13:05like a crop circle reaching beyond the horizon.
13:08Puzzled, Kulik pressed on up the river until he came to yet another strange feature.
13:17The trees here were still upright,
13:20but some powerful force had stripped them naked like telegraph poles.
13:26In Kulik's experience, no meteorite or any other known disaster
13:31had ever created destruction on such an awe-inspiring scale.
13:35The Tunguska explosion was about 15 megatons of energy,
13:50a thousand times larger than the Hiroshima bomb,
13:53actually about the same size as the big city killer bombs
13:56that were deployed during the Cold War.
13:59If such an explosion took place over a city,
14:01it would be destroyed and millions of people killed.
14:03If we're ever going to have an effective defense program
14:07against being struck by near-earth objects,
14:10we have to understand what they're like,
14:12so we know how we can fight back.
14:13We now have quite clear information about the events of the Tunguska meteorite,
14:21if it was a comet or if it was a asteroid,
14:26it happens in the middle of one time in 300 years.
14:29If the Tunguska meteorite would fall on 4-5 hours later,
14:34and the Tunguska meteorite would fall on 4-5 hours later,
14:36it would fall on 4-5 hours later.
14:38And the number of deaths would be measured by hundreds of thousands of human lives.
14:44It is possible that an asteroid is going to come out of the sky next year,
14:53and I do not believe for a moment that we will be able to
14:58galvanize humanity into a situation where it could do anything effective to handle that.
15:04I think whenever it should occur, whether it is 10 people in the middle of Siberia,
15:11or 100,000 people in the city, or 100 million people on a continent,
15:18or the whole human race, we should do what we can to prevent it.
15:24To understand our cosmic enemies better, space agencies are sending probes out to comets and
15:30asteroids. As no results will come back till the next century, Russian and American strategists
15:35are already planning to redeploy Star Wars technology for a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
15:46But until we know more, such a move could be foolhardy.
15:50In the meantime, Tunguska is the best source of knowledge we have.
15:54I think a very dangerous thing to attempt any deflection of an asteroid until you knew exactly
16:03what it was made up of. It matters a lot whether you're deflecting nickel iron or shaving foam.
16:10In one case you may successfully deflect, on the other you may simply break it into bits and shower
16:17the Earth with Hiroshima-sized impacts, which would be much worse than just letting the thing come in
16:22unbroken. If you get it wrong, it could be quite catastrophic.
16:37Until recently, no Western scientist wanting to study Tunguska would have been permitted to
16:42penetrate this far, to Krasnoyarsk, the nearest big city to the site.
16:52A few miles from here lie vast uranium mines and secret underground cities.
17:05Arriving on the Trans-Siberian Railway is a team of scientists from Tomsk University,
17:11on their way to the Tunguska epicentre.
17:15Academician Vasiliev and a group of volunteers hope to find fresh clues at Tunguska that may help
17:20international scientists understand future impacts and how to combat them.
17:26Starved of funds by their government, each scientist has to raise the equivalent of three months of their
17:31meagre annual salary, just to make the long journey to the site, by train, plane and helicopter.
17:41Starved of funds by Tunguska.
17:53Though tired by the long journey, the scientist's enthusiasm for the mission ahead is stronger than ever.
17:58There is no one at all comparison.
18:00As, as a result, he listens to the Nelson Mandelman wéral,
18:01The apples in the years, it is a moment
18:02that we have introduced ecologies of the toppast and cycleрет
18:06of the solving of the són Earth
18:08with the small objects of the Sonskimas.
18:13To limit the natural natural naturaluyorum in terms of the cruise of the weather,
18:17we need to determine where the conditions of the cosmos reached,
18:19the species of the sun is所以.
18:28Maybe we'll get something to answer the question,
18:32what was it all about?
18:58Everyone hopes that there will soon be a breakthrough
19:02in this tantalizing cosmic mystery.
19:17For years, this area has been closed to foreigners.
19:21Nobody was allowed to come to the site.
19:24And this is a new stage in Tunguska Research
19:28when we can offer the international scientific community
19:32all the data accumulated through years.
19:40Flying low over the Chagin Canyon today,
19:43it's hard to believe that the whole forest was once laid flat.
19:47It's only on the bare patches of Cascade Mountain
19:55that some of the 90-year-old scars can still be seen.
19:59We're getting on for a century beyond the event.
20:07And if you go there, you discover that the forest has regrown
20:12and virtually obliterated the site.
20:15So it is particularly difficult to find the sort of evidence you need.
20:33Quickly re-establishing their base camp,
20:43the volunteers prepare for another attempt
20:45to solve the Tunguska mystery
20:47in the few weeks granted by the brief Siberian summer.
20:53Determined as they are to make a breakthrough this time,
20:56the team acknowledge their place at the end of a long line
20:59of Soviet scientists who have been here before them.
21:05Despite lavish funding in the past,
21:07many academics have endured the hardships of life in the forest
21:11only to return home defeated.
21:13The problem of what exactly took place here on June 30, 1908,
21:25has exerted such a profound hold on the Russian imagination
21:29that in the 70 years since the epicentre of the Tunguska explosion
21:33was finally identified in 1928,
21:36more than 150 different theories have been put forward.
21:40I have been coming to this place since 1978,
21:50and that's almost half of my life.
21:52If we look at each hypothesis,
21:55none of them practically can account for all the facts
21:59that had been accumulated in decades
22:03of very thorough research in the area.
22:06Of course, the first theory belonged to Leonid Kulik.
22:11He believed he'd found a crater beneath which an iron meteorite must lie,
22:16much like the one found under the massive meteor crater in Arizona.
22:22Although what Kulik took to be a crater was, by contrast,
22:25small and modestly covered by vegetation,
22:27he believed it must be the right place to start digging.
22:31The treacherous southern swamp, full of unpromising-looking boggy water,
22:37came to obsess Kulik.
22:39It was here, on numerous expensive and increasingly elaborate expeditions,
22:45that Vasiliev's haunted predecessor kept returning year after year.
22:50Setting his team to drain the swamp,
22:53Kulik first ordered a primitive form of pumping.
22:57But when this failed,
22:58he pressed his workers on into the winter
23:00and commanded a massive system of trenches
23:02to be dug below the water table.
23:05But when they finally sucked the bog dry,
23:08there was to be a disappointment.
23:10At the bottom they found nothing but an ancient tree stump.
23:16When all attempts to find a crater or any tiny cosmic fragments failed,
23:24the disappointed Kulik enlisted in the army
23:27and was killed in the Second World War.
23:30Before he died, he'd come to believe
23:33that the Tunguska object was a comet,
23:35primarily made of ice,
23:37that must have fragmented and simply melted away.
23:40In the absence of a crater,
23:50scientists were forced to study what they had.
23:53And what they had was an intricate pattern of tree fall.
23:57One of the largest tasks ever undertaken at the site
24:00was the mapping and measuring of every tree known to have fallen in 1908
24:05over the entire 2,000 square kilometer area.
24:09The scientists measured the exact angle from north
24:14at which each tree had fallen.
24:17This would establish the object's angle of entry and trajectory.
24:22Astronomers could then estimate the original orbit
24:26and draw up a short list of cosmic suspects.
24:34But it wasn't until 1938, at the behest of Kulik,
24:38that an immense aerial photographic survey of the area was begun.
24:42Over 1,500 pictures were pieced together.
24:45They revealed an extraordinary pattern.
24:48The trees had fallen into a massive butterfly shape.
24:52Each wing of the butterfly was over 25 miles long
24:56and stretched beyond the eye's horizon, far into the Siberian forest.
25:01The sheer scale of the damage was breathtaking.
25:06It would have meant the butterfly-shaped demolition of every building and tree
25:13within the entire London area circled by the M25 motorway.
25:17The Tunguska butterfly didn't just mesmerize Russian scientists,
25:23it grabbed the popular imagination too.
25:26Filmmakers attempted to capture it on camera, advised by Kulik himself.
25:31But such attempts were based on a misconception.
25:38The object was thought to have hit the ground before exploding
25:42and burning everything around it.
25:48But when researchers at the site investigated the precise burn damage
25:52caused to the 1908 trees, nothing seemed to add up.
25:56They could find no pattern matching any sort of explosion
25:59with which they were familiar at the time.
26:02It looked as if the fire had been lit and quickly extinguished,
26:06as though a giant had blown out the candles on a 2,000 square kilometre cake.
26:13But then an outside event altered the course of the research.
26:17The atomic clouds blacken the sun. Incredible. Terrifying.
26:34An explosion equivalent to that caused by 1,500 tonnes of TNT rocked the Earth.
26:39Its vivid flash illuminated the faces of onlookers seven miles away.
26:42Although only a fraction of the size of the Tunguska explosion,
26:46early nuclear tests gave researchers a point of reference
26:49with which to attack the puzzle.
26:51At Nagasaki, telegraph pole trees were left standing at the epicentre.
26:56Elsewhere, the blast had flattened everything.
26:59Tunguska revealed an identical pattern.
27:02Scientists began to think the unthinkable.
27:05Could Tunguska have been a nuclear blast even before the invention of the bomb?
27:10In the event, tests ruled out radioactivity.
27:17But Dr. Zotkin of the Meteorite Committee now had a model of sufficient size to apply to Tunguska.
27:25The pattern of destruction common to both explosions suggested that the Tunguska blast had not been caused by an object hitting the ground,
27:37but by an explosion high in the air.
27:41Dr. Zotkin began a series of experiments, hoping to replicate the butterfly pattern.
27:58Dr. Zotkin found that by exploding a charge descending at a certain angle above a forest of artificial trees,
28:18he would get completely different shaped effects on the ground, depending on the angle, shape, and force of his explosive charge.
28:25When we first hit the gun, it turned out that the explosion was too strong.
28:36Our equipment broke, our artificial knives fell apart, but we reduced the power of the explosion.
28:43And finally, we started to get a very good picture.
28:46To his joy, Zotkin found he'd not only recreated the unique Tunguska butterfly,
28:59he'd even got the circle of trees left standing at the epicenter.
29:03And when we did it, when we got to the high-faceted sky and the small four-faceted
29:19force of the Tunguska butterfly, we were very excited.
29:22In the result of these experiences, we could make a conclusion that the slope of the trajectory was about 30 degrees.
29:32If the meteorite was flying slower, the field would be rounded.
29:38If the meteorite was flying slower, then there would be a tree.
29:43The trees would fall perpendicular to the trajectory.
29:47From this one experiment, Zotkin calculated the object's 30-degree angle of entry above the horizon.
29:54And by assuming its trajectory ran down the center of the butterfly, he fixed its bearing from north at 115 degrees.
30:07Zotkin's experiment enabled other scientists to calculate that the explosion must have been a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima,
30:15and that it detonated between six and eight kilometers above the ground.
30:26The main significance of the Tunguska blast lies in the fact that we are dealing with an impact which didn't hit the Earth.
30:35And that's what makes it interesting, because we have to take into account the idea that impacts sometimes don't leave fingerprints.
30:47The search for asteroid fragments has come up with nothing, a boost for the comet theory.
30:52It is surprising that nobody has found anything at all.
30:58If you were dealing with a rocky body, I would have been looking for at least fist-sized lumps spread around,
31:03but nobody has found anything.
31:05This, I think, is a brownie point for the cometary theory.
31:09But the idea that it was an asteroid can't be ruled out entirely.
31:12Some asteroids may have become so fragile they too can vaporize in the Earth's atmosphere.
31:17But at least one scientist believes he can eliminate certain theories on the basis of physical probability.
31:25The best way to investigate what the physical nature of the Tunguska event was,
31:32was to just ask yourself for an object coming in on its trajectory with the energy that we know it had from the explosion,
31:39an energy of about 15 megatons, what sort of object would penetrate to within 8 kilometers of the surface and then explode.
31:48And this excludes a metal object, it excludes a very hard, solid, stony object,
31:54it also excludes a loose, friable, low-density object like a comet.
31:58So really the only thing it could have been is stony material.
32:02But comets can have a disconcerting habit of camouflaging themselves.
32:09Their outgassing nuclei can switch off,
32:13leaving them almost indistinguishable from ordinary asteroids.
32:18Now one of the problems for a simple comet theory is that cometary material is so weak,
32:29you might imagine it would explode higher up than it actually did.
32:33But it's possible that you are dealing with cometary material which has some strength to it,
32:38either because it's developed a mantle or because of processing after it's lost its gas.
32:43So it could imitate a rocky asteroid in many respects.
32:49Whether the Tunguska object was an asteroid or a dormant comet, we may never know.
32:54But the lack of fragments could be explained by the speed at which it entered the atmosphere.
33:03It's likely that the Tunguska object came in at 25 kilometers per second.
33:08At that speed, you're more or less hitting a brick wall eight or nine kilometers up.
33:12And this would result in an immediate conversion of the kinetic energy of the object into thermal energy.
33:20And the thing would just explode like a bomb.
33:22Simple as that. It's just a straightforward explosion.
33:25You don't see any debris because the fireball could be 100,000 degrees hot
33:29and this would vaporize everything. Possibly.
33:33But since few believe that everything could have vaporized,
33:39the search goes on for minute particles that may still hold cosmic clues to the object's identity.
33:47One of the basic questions about the Tunguska object is whether it was just a random asteroid entering our atmosphere and blowing up,
33:59or whether it was actually part of a stream of material which was thrown out by a comet sometime in the past.
34:17About 50 streams of primitive material are wheeling through space,
34:24but only one of them is likely to have collided with Earth on June 30, 1908.
34:29Known as the Beta-Torrid stream or complex, it has an unusually stable orbit at five degrees to the solar plane.
34:36The Earth moves through it each November and June.
34:42Much of the Beta-Torrid stream is thought to have broken off from the comet Enki, which moves in a similar orbit.
34:48On June the 30th, an object from this stream may have hit the Earth over Siberia.
34:54The Tunguska object came in on the 30th of June.
35:00This also coincides with the maximum of the so-called Beta-Torrid shower,
35:05and the orbit of Tunguska's comet coming out of the Sun in the early morning
35:10are telling us that in all probability this was part of the Torrid complex.
35:14There is only one way the Tunguska team can hope to move from such circumstantial evidence to proof.
35:32They must find some material in the soil or peat moss dated to 1908.
35:38This may still retain some faint but conclusively distinctive chemical signature
35:43of the original cosmic object.
35:46The Earth, because of its long and involved geological history,
35:50bears unique signatures of the terrestrial origin of the rocks,
35:55signatures that are read when you measure the ratios of different isotopes of elements.
36:00The Moon is quite distinct, even though lunar material came from the Earth as a result of a giant impact.
36:06Mars is different yet, so are the asteroids.
36:09It's really not difficult.
36:11Once you have a fragment of rock to analyze it in a modern laboratory
36:15and get the answer almost immediately as to whether it's from the Earth,
36:19from the Moon, from Mars, from the asteroid Besta, or somewhere else.
36:24Dr. Kolesnikov of Moscow State University has been working on Tunguska ever since the 1960s,
36:31when he ruled out radiation at the site.
36:34Now he's searching for 1908 samples that he hopes will allow him to identify the material once and for all.
36:41In several torfianic fields in the epicenter of the Earth,
36:45we have been researching the isotope cells of the water and isotope cells of the water and isotope cells in the torf.
36:55Pete Moss is one of the best places to look for minute particles that may still retain chemical evidence.
37:01For this we used the upper torfianic fields with phagnum fuscum,
37:08which can be used to be dated,
37:13which are only aerosols of air,
37:18and therefore are the natural concentrations of earth and cosmic dust.
37:23Kolesnikov and his team studied the different layers of peat.
37:37From the 1908 level down to the permafrost,
37:40they found distinctive hydrogen and carbon isotopes.
37:44Not only did this indicate an object from outer space,
37:47but according to Kolesnikov, an object of a particular kind.
37:52These anomalies нельзя объяснить присутствием
37:56какими-то земными причинами.
37:59Присутствием земной пыли.
38:01Нельзя объяснить и присутствием вещества типа обычных метеоритов.
38:06В то же время можно объяснить присутствием
38:10распыленного вещества типа углистых хондритов
38:13или, скорее всего, кометного вещества.
38:17Кolesников's results are highly controversial.
38:24They suggest that Kulik may have been right
38:27when he speculated that the Tunguska object came from a comet.
38:31If this latest work is correct,
38:34it may help explain further curious findings at the site.
38:38Ludmila Chastokolinka, a research biologist,
38:49has been uncovering evidence that even she finds hard to believe.
38:53It may suggest that some form of biological transformation has occurred
38:59which could only have been caused by a comet.
39:03В 1985 году мне привезли из центра Тунгусского взрыва материал.
39:13К моему великому удивлению оказалось,
39:16что количество аномалий, которые здесь встречаются,
39:19на хромосомах, то есть когда клетки делятся,
39:21они делятся ненормально, аномально.
39:24И оказалось число таких растений оказалось намного выше,
39:28чем можно было предположить.
39:31И когда я этот материал показала своим коллегам, друзьям по-тунгусски,
39:37ну вот вы можете посмотреть, какие здесь такие вот патологии.
39:42Они сказали, здесь этого быть не может.
39:48Despite her colleagues' incredulity, Chastokolinka persevered.
39:52She compared the cell division abnormalities found at Tunguska
39:56with samples from places she would have expected to find abnormalities.
40:00From areas polluted by chemical and nuclear waste.
40:04But to her astonishment, the cell deformities identified at Tunguska
40:09were far greater than those found in the cells taken from the polluted zones.
40:14Now, in this year, we managed to take a test on the Ostrich,
40:28and it turns out that there was a whole range of anomalies.
40:31This is a test on the Tunguska,
40:35it is a very different type of species.
40:36It has a very different shape.
40:37with such an unusual shape.
40:39If it's more or less normal,
40:41then it turns out like this.
40:44These are sterile buttons,
40:46these are sterile fingers.
40:48But the reason is not yet clear,
40:52so I think we need to continue these experiments.
41:07At the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
41:16the teraflops computer,
41:18originally programmed to model nuclear explosions,
41:21is now being used to simulate impacts of comets and asteroids.
41:28When Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was due to hit Jupiter in 1994,
41:33the teraflops predicted that enormous plumes of debris
41:36would be blown back into space.
41:38Many doubted this would happen.
41:54Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had an energy
41:56that was considerably greater than anything
41:59we've been able to test here on the Earth.
42:01Fortunately for us, it was half a billion miles away,
42:04so we didn't have to actually worry about the consequences
42:07of such an experiment.
42:08The comet explosion vindicated the computer predictions.
42:11It left a bruise the size of Earth.
42:14Now, the Sandia scientists turned their attention closer to home.
42:18And so it was a natural consequence at that point
42:21to ask the question, what would happen if Shoemaker-Levy 9
42:24had hit the Earth instead of Jupiter?
42:26This is a model of a one-kilometer comet coming into the Earth's atmosphere
42:37at 60 kilometers per second and striking Earth's ocean.
42:40At this time, the explosion, which is about 27 million times the energy
42:45of the Hiroshima explosion, is about the size of New York City.
42:49As it gets bigger, the debris is kicked up to an altitude
42:53of at least several hundred kilometers, but traveling upwards so quickly
42:57that it goes into orbit about the Earth has gone high enough
43:00to knock out low-Earth orbiting satellites.
43:02The ripples that you're seeing here are about 100 meters high,
43:06but that's nothing compared to the size of the wave that follows.
43:10This wave that is about 10 kilometers high at this point will propagate out
43:14at about the rate at which a jet airplane can fly.
43:17And it won't reach any coastlines for several hours after impact,
43:21but when it does, it will have a magnitude greater
43:24than any tidal wave experienced in human history.
43:28Impacts on the scale of Tunguska are the only ones
43:31that have a reasonably high probability of happening in our lifetime.
43:36If we want to understand the long-term threat,
43:38we have to understand the smaller events and model the smaller events,
43:43which are the only ones that we're really ever going to be able to gather data on.
43:48This is a simulation we did of the Tunguska explosion
43:51based on the methodology that we developed for Shoemaker-Levy 9.
43:55And this is a plume that's grown three minutes after impact.
43:58This horizontal bar is the entire thickness of the atmosphere, up to 90 kilometers.
44:08I think this is completely consistent with the fact that no debris was found,
44:12or very little debris was found at the impact site at Tunguska,
44:15because the asteroid that came in, the object that came in,
44:19was completely crushed up, exploded, vaporized,
44:21and all that dust was entrained with this plume and got ejected back out into space.
44:25And, of course, it wasn't going at high enough velocity
44:28to completely leave the gravitational influence of the Earth.
44:32It came back down on top of the atmosphere.
44:35In fact, Shoemaker-Levy 9, the plume from Shoemaker-Levy 9,
44:39fell down and formed a cloud the size of the Earth in Jupiter's atmosphere,
44:44and that was so high in Jupiter's atmosphere that it reflected sunlight,
44:48even when it was just barely over the horizon on Jupiter's night side.
44:53I think a very similar phenomenon was responsible for the light nights.
44:59Right after the impact, this stretched out clear over to Lake Baikal,
45:03and it may be that if some of this dust settled out, some of the larger particles,
45:08they may actually still be there in the sediments of Lake Baikal.
45:12If Boslow is right, Russian scientists may have been looking for debris in the wrong place,
45:16but what Zotkin got right was the butterfly pattern.
45:19You see there's actually an area here where the horizontal part of the wind speed is very close to zero.
45:29That's where we think the epicenter of the explosion was,
45:32and that's where trees were actually found standing vertically.
45:36The Russians called those telegraph poles
45:38because they were still standing there with all their limbs torn off.
45:41But for Boslow, who believes the Tunguska object was an asteroid,
45:46can his computer simulations provide an answer one way or the other?
45:51Our simulations can't rule out a comet.
45:54All we can do is take our simulations and show that they are most consistent with certain parameters,
46:00but if it came in at a steeper angle, there may be another explanation.
46:05It could be a comet, it could be an asteroid.
46:07While its ultimate identity remains unknown, scientists do now know that the Tunguska object was stony
46:15and may have been a fragment from the beta-torid complex.
46:19It exploded between six and eight kilometres above the ground.
46:23About the size of a football field, it came in from the sun at an angle of 30 to 35 degrees to the horizon,
46:30travelling at well over 20 kilometres a second.
46:32As it struck Earth's atmosphere, a plume of debris was ejected back into space,
46:39causing bright nights around the world.
46:46the Tunguska object was ejected back into space.
46:58Astronomers know that what has happened before can happen again.
47:03Do you think that's the same image as these?
47:06Yes.
47:06Do you think it is?
47:07Yes.
47:07Worldwide, only a handful of them are dedicated to predicting the next major collision.
47:13At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Eleanor Helene is one of the few
47:20who are scanning the skies for near-Earth objects, which she believes could threaten our planet.
47:25And we'll keep this one.
47:28We'll move forward.
47:31Wow.
47:31That's great.
47:32That'll put our eye out.
47:34Bright magnitude.
47:35It's classified as an Earth Approacher.
47:39We know when we find something that's moving 5 to 10 to 15 degrees a day,
47:46and we see this long streak going across the sky, it's sobering.
47:51So when we're talking about something of, say, 100 meters or 200 meters in the size range of the
47:58Tunguska event, then the numbers of these objects out there are significant such that we could predict
48:08something on the order of every 100 to 300 years, we are going to be hit by a Tunguska-sized object.
48:17Something of this size could really strike our planet at any time.
48:23And I don't want to look like a scaremonger, but I honestly feel that there's that possibility,
48:31and I only hope and pray that such an event would happen in a low population area.
48:40Oh, my God. What have we got?
49:10I strongly believe that this place needs to be saved for future generations,
49:34because if our present generation of scientists cannot solve this mystery,
49:40probably our children will be able to do that.
49:42which are the true things, you know.
49:45And progress by articulating plants are allowing new to die,
49:48and the path will destroy charity.
49:54Help us grow!
49:57When we are 2020 through on our 100%shirt and so on our 100%-megasps present,
50:00the misery of nature.
50:06SPEAKER 3
50:09Coming up next, do you recognize this man?
50:11And his weaknesses lie in gambling, whiskey and women, his strength in criminal psychology.
50:18Stay with us for Cracker.
50:34This little piggy lived 250 million years ago.
50:38This little piggy predates the dinosaurs.
50:41This little piggy is your ancestor.
50:44Once upon a time, this little piggy ruled the world.
50:48Science beyond the horizon.
50:50Equinox, next Monday at 9 on 4.
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