Tunguska Explosion

4 Pages 877 Words

I recently read two pieces of literature that had to deal with the discoveries of the mysterious explosion in Tunguska. One article is “What Struck Tunguska?” by Stephen P. Maron. The other is “The Fire Came By” by John Baxter and Thomas Atkins. Both articles discuss various stories and theories accounting for what happened in Tunguska on June 30th in 1908. However, some articles have faulty and unsupported arguments in their essay
The first essay I read was “What Struck Tunguska?” by Stephen P. Maron. The article was written in a scientific style. It used the process of trial and error of ideas to come to a conclusions about the Tunguska object that flew across the sky. The article took the ideas, theories and stories of what may have happened and tested them out. The first argument was in a report by a Siberian newspaper which said that witnesses saw a red hot meteorite fall. However, this report was false because when meteorites fall they are not red- hot but instead cold and covered in frost. The second argument is that the Tunguska object was a comet and exploded deep within the earth. Nevertheless, comets are extremely fragile and often break up in space. Therefore, if the object was a comet it would not have exploded deep within the earth.
There is only one explanation in Maron’s essay that will explain the explosion. The best possible cause of the Tunguska explosion was a theory derived by chemist Ramachandran Ganapathy. He argued that the traces of the shattered object were dispersed around the globe by atmospheric currents. There were high levels of iridium found in Antarctica, which is usually the result of a small stony meteorite. Therefore, Ramachandran Ganapathy’s findings are the strongest case thus far that the Tunguska object was a small stony asteroid.
Besides Stephen P. Maron’s article being argumentative and thorough, it gave an objective discussion of all relatively reasonable possible exp...