Asteroid anniversary recalls Earth's rocky history

The Tunguska collision is a reminder of potential hazards from space.

ByABC News
June 29, 2008, 10:36 PM

July 1, 2008 — -- Summertime a time for sunny days, beach weekends and of course, leisurely reflections on the end of the world and the monster asteroids that could smack into us. The centennial anniversary of the last big impact, the 1908 Tunguska blast that rocked Siberia, falls Monday, June 30, bringing with it a reminder of the very slight chance that a hunk of space rock out there might have Earth's number.

The Tunguska "event" leveled nearly 800 square miles of swampy woodland in Siberia, traveling from the northwest to deliver a 5-megaton blast seen by hundreds of witnesses, including one who created a postage stamp of the explosion. A space rock about 50 yards long had zoomed into the Earth's atmosphere and exploded in mid-air.

"People were knocked off their feet hundreds of miles away," writes astronomer Phil Plait in his upcoming book Death from the Skies! These are the Ways the World Will End. Years later, a scientific expedition to the remote region found trees knocked sideways in straight lines radiating 15 miles away from the blast.

Science journals this week brought us more warnings of asteroid hazards, looking even further back in time. Buried under the Chesapeake Bay and its surroundings hides a 35.4 million year-old impact crater about 56 miles across. A team led by Gregory Gohn of the U.S. Geologic Survey reports in the current Science journal that not only was the blast one that dwarfs the Tunguska event, but the crater might still hold some bad news.

Gohn and his colleagues took 3-mile-deep cores from the center of the crater, which is below a farm on Virginia's Eastern Shore. They found, 3,600 feet down in the cores, evidence that the asteroid impact blew a 900-foot thick "megablock" of granite three miles from the crater's center in the first 10 minutes of the explosion. Another 1,800 feet of impact-shifted rock sits atop the granite, with the whole mass hidden away down in the muddy depths of the placid bay.

Inside the granite layer, the team found few microbes a left-over effect of the blast sterilizing the region, the authors suggest but lots of trapped seawater. The trapped seawater is a hazard for anyone unlucky enough to drill that deep for drinking water.