THE  GEOMAGNETIC  EFFECT  OF  THE  TUNGUSKA  EXPLOSION  AND  THE  TECHNOGENEOUS  HYPOTHESIS  OF  THE  TSB  ORIGIN

V. K. Zhuravlev

8 pages, 3 drawings, 32 references
Here are some excerpts  from the paper and an illustration.
Full copy of the paper may be ordered from RIAP.

Fig. 1. The geomagnetic storm, dated June 30, 1908, as recorded in Irkutsk.

In 1946 the Moscow engineer and science-fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev proposed the hypothesis that the Tunguska event, formerly ascribed to a meteorite fall, had in fact been the catastrophe of a nuclear-powered extraterrestrial spaceship [1]. According to Kazantsev, the complete lack of material remnants of the “meteorite” in taiga, leveled by the tremendous blast over a huge territory, is due to the overground character of the explosion. The altitude of the latter was estimated by the author of the hypothesis as a few hundred of meters.

Since a meteorite can explode only when striking against the Earth's surface, the Tunguska space body (TSB) must have been artificial, or technogeneous. The huge scale of the taiga leveling could be explained by the colossal amount of energy that was released at the time of the explosion, probably of a nuclear nature.

These suppositions stemmed from the close similarity between the Tunguska explosion and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, that did not remain unnoticed by Alexander Kazantsev. Each of them could in principle be verified (proved or disproved) by scientific methods, and therefore the hypothesis as a whole is scientific [2].

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In the mid-twentieth century everyone used to think that technogeneous phenomena were produced by nothing but our own terrestrial civilization. Kazantsev's hypothesis sharply contradicted the general scientific paradigm of those days. It is not surprising therefore that the majority of scientists were more than skeptical about it.

Yet the first expedition sent to the Tunguska site by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR after World War II (in 1958) had to conclude: the TSB explosion did occur in the air [3]. One of the assertions of Kazantsev's, that had seemed ridiculous to specialists in meteoritics, was proven to be true. The altitude of the explosion was found to be even greater than it had been supposed by Kazantsev, namely, 6+-1 km. But taken alone, this fact did not fully validate the technogeneous hypothesis.

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Much to the surprise of the scientists who were convinced of the TSB's natural origin, there were found in 1959 magnetograms of the Irkutsk Magnetographic and Meteorological Observatory (see Fig. 1) that had recorded a magnetic storm of an unusually short duration (about four hours) that had started 6.6+-0.2 min after the moment of the Tunguska explosion. (The latter was calculated from the seismograms of the same observatory, as well as from the barograms of Siberian and European meteorological stations, see Ref. 10.)

The magnetic disturbance, recorded by the three magnetographs of the Irkutsk Magnetographic and Meteorological Observatory on June 30, 1908, had absolutely nothing in common with those induced by invasions of meteor bodies into the atmosphere. It had however all the distinctive features of the disturbances of the geomagnetic field that are generated when nuclear bombs with the TNT equivalent of a few megatons are exploding at heights from 10 to 70 km (Fig. 2, Refs. 11–17).

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To download RB, Vol. 4, No. 1-2, containing a full text of this paper, please click here:
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