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| Fig.1: Treebeard's not going to like this. |
An old maxim goes, "If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Well if about 80 million trees fall as a result of some kind of incredible explosion (fig.1), and no one knows exactly how it happened, do we really care? This is what happened on June 30, 1908 near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in remote central Siberia. The blast leveled over 800 square miles of forest, measured 5.0 on the Ritcher scale, was about 1,000 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and scored a perfect 2400 on its SATs. It is by far the most powerful natural explosion in recorded history (since those dinosaurs were too lazy and dead to write about whatever it was that made them extinct). Luckily enough, the blast occurred in the Pennsyltucky part of Russia and did not cause any casualties, which is more than I can say about my Uncle Lou's indigestion attack of '97 (R.I.P. Miss Pussykins).
