Word: tunguska
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Almost as worrisome are the estimated 300,000 asteroids larger than 300 ft. wide that also come perilously near or intersect Earth's orbit; each could inflict Tunguska-like damage over a large region. The number of Earth-crossing asteroids larger than 60 ft. across, says University of Arizona astronomer Tom Gehrels, could be as high as 100 million. A hit by any one of them could destroy a large city...
...monsters that we need to worry about are the monsters. One of these massive asteroids intersected the orbit of the Earth on June 30th 1908. Six miles above Tunguska, Siberia, it exploded with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima. Almost 500,000 acres of forest were destroyed. The shockwave was strong enough to be detected in America...
...Brian G. Marsden, associate director for planetary sciences at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, rates the chance of a Tunguska-sized asteroid hitting the Earth during the next 100 years as "excellent," and gives smaller but significant odds to an even larger asteroid strike...
Measuring only 60 meters across, the Tunguska asteroid pales in size compared to the one kilometer asteroids which could cause a global climate change, or the 10 kilometer mass to which most scientists attribute the extinction of the dinosaurs...
...crashing comet, wayward black hole or alien spacecraft level the forest around Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908? None of the above. A computer model by NASA scientists revealed that the likely culprit was a stony asteroid -- 30 m (100 ft.) in diameter -- that exploded...