Tunguska explosion caused by meteor

There has been a major development in the investigation into what has become known as the Tunguska Event. For the uninitiated, here is a little background from Wikipedia:

The Tunguska event was an enormously powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, at about 07:14 KRAT (00:14 UT) on June 30 [O.S. June 17], 1908. [citations omitted] The explosion, having the epicentre (60.886°N, 101.894°E), is believed to have been caused by the air burst of a small asteroid or comet at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 mi) above Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded widely varying estimates of the object's size, on the order of 60 m (200 ft) to 190 m (620 ft).[citation omitted] It is the largest impact event on or near Earth in recorded history.[citation omitted] [...]

At around 07:17 local time, Evenks natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the Sun, moving across the sky. About 10 minutes later, there was a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported the sound source moving east to north. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometres away. The majority of witnesses reported only the sounds and the tremors, not the sighting of the explosion. Eyewitness accounts differ as to the sequence of events and their overall duration.

The explosion registered on seismic stations across Eurasia. In some places the shock wave would have been equivalent to an earthquake of 5.0 on the Richter scale.[citation omitted] It also produced fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected in Great Britain. Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe were aglow;[citation omitted] it has been theorized that this was due to light passing through high-altitude ice particles formed at extremely low temperatures, a phenomenon that occurred again when space shuttles re-entered Earth's atmosphere.[citations omitted] In the United States, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory observed a decrease in atmospheric transparency that lasted for several months, from suspended dust.

Because of the remoteness of the Tunguska region and the chaos caused by World War I, the Communist Revolution, and the Russian Civil War, it was not until 1927, when an expedition from the Soviet Academy of Sciences led by Leonid Kulik finally reached the area. Here is how Wikipedia describes what they found:

The spectacle that confronted Kulik as he stood on a ridge overlooking the devastated area was overwhelming. To the explorers' surprise, no crater was to be found. There was instead around ground zero a vast zone (8 kilometres [5.0 mi] across) of trees scorched and devoid of branches, but standing upright. Those farther away had been partly scorched and knocked down in a direction away from the centre. Much later, in the 1960s, it was established that the zone of leveled forest occupied an area of some 2,150 square kilometres (830 sq mi), its shape resembling a gigantic spread-eagled butterfly with a "wingspan" of 70 kilometres (43 mi) and a "body length" of 55 kilometres (34 mi).[citation omitted]

How bad did it look? This bad:

Picture from Leonid Kulik's 1927 expedition to area of Tunguska Event. (From Ars Technica.)

Note that this was in 1927 -- 19 years after the event.

As Nature magazine points out:

At an estimated 3 to 5 megatonnes of TNT equivalent, it was the biggest impact event in recorded history. By comparison, the meteor that struck the Russian region of Chelyabinsk earlier this year 'merely' packed 460 kilotonnes of TNT equivalent.

What is really scary is, what if this had happened today? In an era of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads? Wouldn't we understandably assume this was a nuclear attack? Because, how would we know?

The Tunguska Event has remained a mystery for over a century because of an almost complete lack of evidence as to a cause. As Nature explains:

Numerous scientific expeditions failed to recover any fragments that could be attributed conclusively to the object. Hundreds of microscopic magnetic spheres have been found in the 1950s and 1960s in Tunguska soil samples, but there is continuing debate about whether they are the remnants of a vaporized meteor. “There’s really not much out there, and nothing that’s definitively Tunguska,” says Phil Bland, a meteorite expert at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

The lack of samples has allowed wild speculation about the cause of the event, with some of the more esoteric explanations invoking antimatter and black holes. But most geoscientists think that part of an asteroid, or perhaps a comet, broke away and fell to Earth as a meteor.

Now, we appear to have found some definitive proof. From Ars Technica:

[A] study in the journal Planetary and Space Science provides, for the first time, evidence that the impact was not caused by a comet. Researchers collected microscopic fragments recovered from a layer of partially decayed vegetation (peat) that dates from that extraordinary summer.
Victor Kvasnytsya from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and his colleagues used the latest imaging and spectroscopy techniques to identify aggregates of carbon minerals—diamond, lonsdaleite, and graphite. Lonsdaleite in particular is known to form when carbon-rich material is suddenly exposed to a shock wave created by an explosion, such as that of a meteorite hitting Earth. The lonsdaleite fragments contain even smaller inclusions of iron sulphides and iron-nickel alloys, troilite and taenite, which are characteristic minerals found in space-based objects such as meteorites. The precise combination of minerals in these fragments point to a meteorite source. It is near-identical to similar minerals found in an Arizona impact.
The samples point to one thing: the Tunguska impact is the largest meteorite impact in recorded history. US researchers have estimated that the Tunguska blast could have been as much as the equivalent of a five megaton TNT explosion—hundreds of times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast. The meteorite tore apart as it entered the atmosphere at an angle, so that little of it reached the ground intact. That is why all that remains are such small specks that have been fossilised in the Siberian peat.

Nature gives more details:

Kvasnytsya says that Ukrainian scientist Mykola Kovalyukh, who died last year, collected the fragments in 1978 from a peat bog close to the epicentre of the blast. Research on the fragments in the years following their discovery found that they contained a form of carbon called lonsdaleite, which has a crystal structure somewhere between graphite and diamond, and forms under extreme heat and pressure. But the grains also contained less of the dense metal iridium than is typically found in meteorites — the meteor fragments that are actually recovered on the ground — so researchers had concluded that they were terrestrial rocks altered by the impact. The findings, published in the 1980s in Russian, went largely unnoticed by Western scientists at the time.
Kvasnytsya and his colleagues decided to take a closer look at the fragments using a battery of modern analytical techniques. Transmission electron microscopy showed that the carbon grains were finely veined with iron-based minerals including troilite, schreibersite and the iron–nickel alloy taenite. This patterning and combination of minerals is very similar to that in other iron-rich meteorites. “The samples have almost the entire set of characteristic minerals of diamond-bearing meteorites,” says Kvasnytsya.
“An iron-rich, stony asteroid fits with our understanding of Tunguska,” says Collins [Gareth Collins, Earth-impact researcher at Imperial College London]. Over the past 20 years, several modelling efforts have concluded that a stony asteroid was the only culprit that could have produced the effects reported on the ground [citation omitted] . However, a small but significant minority of scientists still backs the comet hypothesis, he adds.

But, of course, there are doubts:

“They’ve got some interesting stuff here,” but the team does not yet have conclusive proof, says Bland. The low levels of iridium and osmium in the samples are “a red flag” that raises doubts that the fragments originated in an asteroid, he says, and the peat sediment in which the samples were found has not been convincingly dated to 1908. “We get a lot of meteorite material raining down on us all the time,” adds Bland. Without samples of adjacent peat layers for comparison, “it’s hard to be 100% sure that you’re not looking at that background”.

However, in mysteries like this, with the technology we have now you will never get proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In my opinion, absent new evidence to the contrary, the Tunguska mystery is solved.

What next for Egyptian Democracy version 2.0

is the subject of my latest column for Independent Voter Network.

A big effing deal with the potential to get even bigger effing

Ding! Dong! The Douche is gone! Muhammad Morsi has been removed from power:

Tahrir Square erupted in cheers and fireworks moments ago as Egypt’s military deposed President Mohammed Morsi. Egypt’s top general, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, made the announcement on Egypt’s state-run television. The head of state is the chief justice of Egypt’s constitutional court, on an interim basis.
Morsi was elected in Egypt’s first free elections a year ago. He has become unpopular as he has used his power to install radical Islamist rule across Egypt’s government. The demonstrations that turned him out involved millions of Egyptians, in what may have been the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in world history.

Well, let's not get to carried away with the numbers, but they were massive. Even more interesting is this tidbit:

After the Egyptian military announced the end of Mohamed Morsi’s rule flanked by both Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II and Grand Mufti Ahmed al-Tayeb, Islamists began predicting a purge of their kind in the new democratic Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood was not represented among the opposition leaders joining the leaders of Egypt’s two largest faiths and the powerful military figures.
“It is wonderful to see the Egyptian people taking back their stolen revolution in a peaceful way,” the Coptic pope said in a statement Tuesday.
The grand mufti, not considered conservative enough by the Muslim Brotherhood, said the “people have surprised and inspired the world through its elegant expression of their peaceful demands.”

Indeed, it is. The presence of the Coptic leader beside the army leadership is fascinating. It suggests the army isn't just removing the Muslim Brotherhood from power; they are repudiating what the Brotherhood stands for, which is Islamic supremacy. This possibility is supported by this statement from the army:

The general said their working group arrived at its road map to build an “Egyptian society, strong and stable, that will not exclude any one of its sons.”

This is, as Joe Biden would say, "a big [effing] deal." How this plays out remains to be seen, obviously, but the potential is here for Egypt to move fairly quickly into a Turkish-style government(pre-Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) with the army guaranteeing that no religious dictatorship develops.

But potentially, and I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, this is a huge [effing] deal, going far beyond Egypt. Think about this a second. You had millions of Muslims protesting in the streets against an Islamofascist terrorist organization in the Muslim Brotherhood. Millions of Arab Muslims. This is a first. A major, major first.

And why were they protesting? Because they saw what happens when an Islamofascist government rules over them, and they did not like it one bit. Yes, you have Islamofascist governments ruling in Iran and (increasingly) in Turkey. But neither Iran nor Turkey is Arab, so their struggles do not register in the Arab world. Egypt is.

So you had an Islamofascist group (a group that is the spiritual parent of and affiliated with al Qaida)being soundly rejected by the very people the Islamofascists claim wanted it. Now the Arab world can see what happens when the Islamofascists rule an Arab country.

Will they take the lesson to heart in Libya? Tunisia? Syria? Gaza?

Could this turn the tables on a vicious political branch of Islam that has been gaining power and prestige in the past quarter century? Yes. Will it? That remains to be seen.

For now, let's just celebrate something good with the Egyptian people. They made a grievous (and rather obvious) mistake, and they corrected it. Be happy for them. And.may it be a first step in restoring peace and prosperity to the Egyptian civilization

Separated at birth?

The Roman Emperor Caracalla:

Took this picture myself at the Capitoline Museum, Rome.

 and Grumpy Cat:

Probably thinking "Caracalla killed 20,000 Alexandrians? GOOD!"

The anti-Muslim Brotherhood protests in Egypt

are the subject of my latest column for Independent Voter Network. Short story long: when you elect the Muslim Brotherhood, don't be surprised when it acts like the Muslim Brotherhood.

More traitor than hero. Much more.

It seems the more that comes out about NSA "whistleblower" Edward Snowden, the less he looks like a whistleblower and the more he looks like a straight-up traitor. In From the Cold gives more of his distasteful story:

As of this writing, the man who exposed the crown jewels of NSA's intelligence-gathering activities is still on the international concourse at the Moscow Airport, apparently awaiting a flight to Havana, the next stop on his way to Ecuador.
So far, Mr. Snowden has missed at least two flights to Cuba, but (apparently) he has little to worry about--at least on the Russia leg of his global adventure. Various Russian leaders, including Vladimir Putin, have stated they have no intention of turning Putin over to U.S. authorities. True, there is no formal treaty covering such matters between the United States and Russia, but we have extradited at least seven individuals back to Moscow in recent years. As in most aspects of the bi-lateral relationship, extradition is clearly a one-way street.
But the travels of Edward Snowden raise some rather interesting (and dangerous) possibilities. While much of the world hails him as a hero, there is the very real chance that Snowden is nothing more than a spy, masquerading as a whistle-blower. As Bloomberg reported yesterday:

U.S. intelligence agencies are investigating whether Edward Snowden’s leaks may be a Chinese intelligence operation or whether China might have used his concerns about U.S. surveillance practices to exploit him, according to four American officials.
The officials emphasized there’s no hard evidence yet that Snowden was a Chinese agent or that China helped plan his flights to Hong Kong and then to Moscow, directly or through a witting or unwitting intermediary. Rather, they are duty-bound to probe such a worst-case scenario for the U.S., said the officials, who are familiar with the case and asked not to be identified to discuss classified intelligence. 

Well, since the beginning of this affair that has been the big question, alongside "What is your name?", "What is your quest?", "What is your favorite color?" and "What is the capital of Assyria?" But right now, it is us being tossed into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. The release of Snowden's information coincided with the a visit by Chinese leadership to the US in the aftermath of revelations that the Chinese had been hacking US government networks. In From the Cold gives the caveat, but then gives the caveat a caveat:

To be fair, the potential "Beijing connection" may be little more than an effort by the intel community--and the Obama Administration--to cover their collective posteriors. Counter-intelligence officials were reportedly aware of Snowden's massive download of NSA collection documents in mid-May, about the time he left Hawaii and traveled to Hong Kong.
Yet, the collective resources of the FBI (on American soil) and the CIA (overseas) were unable to prevent Snowden from leaving the United States. Equally embarrassing, the same agencies have had difficulty keeping up with him as he circles the globe, and there has been no talk about possibly nabbing him. Might we suggest a little light reading about the Mossad operation that capture Adolf Eichmann in Argentina?

Another piece of this still-incomplete puzzle is that Snowden didn't actually just fall into this classified information. He sought it out:

Edward Snowden took a job with a firm that provides contractors to the National Security Agency solely to gather evidence about U.S. surveillance programs, the self-avowed leaker told the South China Morning Post Newspaper.
"My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked," the Post quoted him as saying in a story published Monday. "That is why I accepted that position about three months ago."
The documents Snowden has revealed so far -- he claims to have thousands more -- revealed classified details of U.S. programs to monitor domestic telephone traffic, as well as the activities of Internet users overseas.
He has also said the National Security Agency hacks into major Internet pipelines to intercept millions of communications flowing through them each day.

That sorta changes things, doesn't it? No one is claiming Snowden is the sharpest crayon in the box. He's a high school dropout, yet he not only ended up with a treasure trove of highly classified signals intelligence but he managed to elude the CIA and the FBI and escape the country. He claims he did it because, to paraphrase, he saw the US becoming more like China and Russia, so he flees to ... China and Russia. The first place he fled was to China. This does not make sense. He is obviously being played, but by whom is the question.

Did China put him up to this? In From the Cold:

[T]here are hints that Snowden may have shared that treasure trove of top secret documents with his Chinese hosts during that sojourn in Hong Kong. Call it the "price of admission." While the former British colony enjoys more autonomy (and freedom) than other parts of China, the harboring of an individual like Mr. Snowden doesn't happen by accident, or without the approval of senior leadership in Beijing.
And, given the fact the Chinese have been so accommodating to the former intelligence analyst, it's quite likely they got something in return; namely, detailed information on NSA collection efforts against the PRC's computer networks. With that sort of windfall, it's quite reasonable that Beijing would offer protection, clearance for a private jet flight on to Moscow, and other forms of compensation.
In other words, Snowden may be no different from Robert Hanssen, Rick Ames, John Walker and other turncoats who sold out their country for good, old-fashioned cash. After all, Snowden needs some way to pay the bills, beyond future income for book and movie deals. For the type of information he may have provided, Snowden could receive millions of dollars from spymasters in Beijing and Moscow. That could support a very comfortable lifestyle in Havana, Quito, or other locations beyond the reach of American extradition laws. 

Not beyond reasonable doubt, but the circumstantial evidence is piling up, and many do not like where it is leading. Patterico:

If you’re wedded to the narrative of Snowden-as-hero, then he Struck a Blow for Truth and Justice, and it hardly matters that he is furnishing unfriendly countries with information that has zero to do with exposing surveillance of U.S. citizens — but gives those countries a propaganda victory, or perhaps something even more valuable, like a technical roadmap of our surveillance network. To make a whistleblower omelet, you gotta crack open a few choice secrets for our enemies, to encourage them to facilitate your escape from the country you’re trying to save.
[...]
The more I learn about Snowden, the more I find his actions distasteful — and I haven’t seen anything he revealed that is obviously a violation of the Fourth Amendment. When media outlets broke the SWIFT story during Bush’s tenure, I was outraged. While I was torn about prosecuting the journalists, I wanted to explore whether the journalists should be prosecuted if they knowingly helped reveal classified information about an effective and legal program — and I leaned slightly towards the view that prosecution was wise. Tell me why I should not feel the same way about this. I know it’s very fashionable to say that it’s unthinkable to “prosecute journalists for journalism” — but if national security information is legitimately classified, helps us fight terrorism, and is knowingly revealed by a “journalist,” I don’t know that such actions are obviously beyond prosecution.
As I said in 2006, a lot of it comes down to whether the journalist is exposing wrongdoing or whether they are just telling our secrets. Often they think they are doing the former when they are just doing the latter.
Does a spy get to be a hero if he is revealing secrets to “We the People” as well as Russia and China to buy off their cooperation? 

(emphasis in original)

Allahpundit:

Snowden’s fans think he’s morally justified in doing basically anything he has to in order to stay out of the feds’ clutches, whether it be handing propaganda windfalls to Russia and China by seeking refuge there or threatening to spill a gigantic treasure trove of sensitive information. Maybe they’ll draw the line if/when we find out he paid off his protectors with intelligence — as Greenwald now admits Snowden did to a small degree in revealing the IP addresses of Chinese computers hacked by the NSA — but I doubt it. This is why it gets stupider by the day to say that the story of his escape is merely a distraction from the far more important story of U.S. surveillance capabilities. How is it “distracting” to know there’s a guy running around in China and Russia with huge stores of state secrets, essentially blackmailing the government to let him leak selectively with impunity or else he’ll leak indiscriminately? On what planet is that a non-story?
[...]
As for the point that all of this stuff has been carefully vetted, Snowden’s critics toss around the word “narcissistic” usually without explaining what they mean, but this is a fine example of it. He seems to believe he’s reached a degree of omniscience where he can pick and choose what to leak with confidence that it won’t put people at risk, won’t injure the American public’s interest in its own national security, and won’t give rogue regimes critical information on how to improve surveillance. Why he thinks this, I have no idea. Whatever he has and however long he’s sifted through it, he can’t see the entire chessboard, especially on the enemy’s side of the board. To take a minor example, the stuff he leaked about the NSA spying on Medvedev at the G20 a few years ago noted that the U.S. thought it had discovered a change in the way the Russians were transmitting their leadership signals. Did Russia realize that before the Guardian’s story was published a few weeks ago? Probably. Maybe not. Who knows? Does Snowden? And if that’s the sort of thing he’s willing to leak to a paper, what’s in the doomsday files that he doesn’t feel comfortable sharing with journalists (yet)? It’s amazing to me that he feels he can tell what’s truly damaging and what isn’t, and that he thinks he can keep this information secret at his whim from intelligence services all over the world. Frankly, knowing now about the doomsday files, don’t enemies like Russia and China have an extra incentive to disappear him? If anything happens to him, Snowden’s defenders will assume that it was U.S. intel that did it; presumably that’ll trigger the doomsday files, and that’ll give Russia, China, and everyone else access to whatever’s in Snowden’s secret stash. I’m not sure, in other words, that the doomsday stuff doesn’t jeopardize his safety more than it protects it.
It’s hard to recall now, but this clusterfark began ostensibly because Snowden’s conscience could no longer tolerate infringements on Americans’ civil liberties by the U.S. government. Are we to believe, then, that everything in the doomsday files is related to that narrow subject too? If it is, then why is he holding it back? Release it and help the civil libertarian cause before it’s too late. If it isn’t, then why did he take it in the first place and why is he threatening to release it now? We seem to be paying an increasingly steep price in blows to national security for what we’ve learned about data-mining.

"Comprehensive immigration reform"

is the subject of my latest column for Independent Voter Network.