Zusammenfassung
The summer of 1908 witnessed the arrival of an unknown space body and an explosion over the Tunguska forest in Central Siberia that could have flattened any major city on Earth.
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In 1908, the Julian calendar was in use in Russia, but to avoid confusion, all dates in the book are given by the Gregorian calendar.
See Nature, 1908, Vol. 78, No. 2019, p. 221.
The TNT equivalent of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 13 kilotons (kt). Dividing 50 Mt (that is 50,000 kt) by 13 kt we obtain 3,846. Even if we limit the Tunguska explosion’s TNT equivalent to 40 Mt, the result will be 3,077. But of course, the effect of one super powerful explosion is considerably less devastating than that of a group of less-powerful ones. Three thousand “Tunguska mini-meteorites,” each of them exploding with the magnitude of 13 kt, would have flattened a much greater area of the taiga than happened in reality.
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Rubtsov, V. (2009). The Enigma of Tunguska. In: The Tunguska Mystery. Astronomers' Universe. Copernicus, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-76574-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-76574-7_1
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