William sent in the interesting link to https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tunguska-event-biggest-asteroid-impact-150047293.html … in a way it is a peculiar story as the absence of an impact crater would suggest it was not a rocky asteroid and was in fact a fragment of a comet that entered the atmosphere and blew itself up before it actually reached the ground. The flattened trees are evidence of a shock wave – not an impact. In this story it is assumed it was an asteroid. I don’t know why they make that assumption, but they do. They go on to say it flattened millions of trees in Siberia over 830 square miles, but nobody has yet found any asteroid fragments, or an impact site. One popular idea, we are told, is that the asteroid formed Lake Cheko, around 5 miles away from the explosion epicentre. However, it was established that sediments in the lake were at least a couple of centuries older than Tunguska, and further research by Russian scientists found that the conical shape of Lake Cheko was echoed in a couple of lakes around 30 miles further away.
So, what happened to the asteroid, it continues. A paper in 2020 suggested a huge iron asteroid may have passed through the earth’s atmosphere – then escaped without breaking up. This appears to be contrary to the event itself in which an explosion of some kind did happen – lighting the sky as far away as western Europe, or extending the day time [kind of like the Long Day of Jushua biblical tale]. The narrative at the link is presented as a mystery when it can be explained by a chondrite meteor, with an origin in a fragmenting comet at a much earlier date, that exploded, distributing its parts through the taiga forest. Going by the Winchcombe Meteor [see post a couple of months ago] some chondrite meteors are formed of material that is quite soft and over a period of time will disintengrate on the ground. Tunguska occurred in 1908 – over a hundred years ago. Therefore if it was a comet fragment it could easily have disappeared without trace. Having said that there have been a lot, and I mean a lot, of books and articles written on the Tunguska object. It has even been suggested it was an alien craft. Presumably, the lizards onboard are still with us – somewhere. Being flippant apart, not many people would agree it was an asteroid – so this is in itself, a mystery. It must have been a meteor of some kind and most of them have an origin in comets.