Word: tunguska
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...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...
This century has already seen a major meteorite blast. In 1908, either an asteroid or a comet exploded about five miles above the remote Stony Tunguska River region of Siberia, igniting and flattening trees over hundreds of square miles. From descriptions of the blast and photographs of the damage, scientists have estimated that the object was at least 200 ft. across and caused a twelve-megaton explosion...
That comets do occasionally strike the earth seems certain. Some scientists think a tiny chunk of a comet, exploding in the atmosphere above Siberia in 1908, caused a tremendous blast and fireball in the Tunguska region, felling trees in a 200-sq.-mi. area and knocking the nearest residents (40 miles away) off their feet...
...fireball that rose over a conifer forest in the remote Stony Tunguska River basin in central Siberia on the morning of June 30, 1908, reached an altitude of twelve miles, and the blast was heard hundreds of miles away. Those closest to the explosion, the townspeople of Vanavara, 40 miles away, felt a wave of intense heat; windows cracked, objects fell from walls, and one man sitting on his porch was thrown several yards and knocked unconscious. Trees were flattened and scorched over an area of several hundred square miles, their felled trunks all pointing away from the epicenter...
Even now, more than three-quarters of a century after the spectacular event at Tunguska, scientists are certain only that a celestial intruder was responsible. Some argue that it was an asteroid as large as 500 ft. across and weighing 7 million tons, which rapidly heated as it entered the earth's atmosphere and exploded about five miles above ground. Others believe it was a small comet. Whatever the cause, the destructive power of the object from space rivaled that of a very large nuclear warhead; scientists gauge the explosion at twelve megatons...