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The Path of a Comet and Phaethon's Ride
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13053 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1995 |
4,254 Words |
| Author
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Bob Kobres
Since the early 1980s Bob Kobres has been investigating
astromythology for potential evidence of cosmic impact events
as well as advocating a defense system to prevent future
occurrences of this infrequent but otherwise inevitable
natural phenomenon. He is with the University of Georgia
libraries and is presently working on an annotated
bibliography to assist students with this newly emerging field
of inquiry. |
It was also in 1927 that Russian scientist Leonid Kulik located the Tunguska area, devastated in 1908 by the twenty-megaton aerial explosion of what was probably a piece of debris long ago separated from the progenitor of the still-extant comet Encke. Kulik expected to find a crater similar to the structure in Arizona; when he finally found the site he sought, he was a bit dumbfounded. The devastation was obvious: Over two thousand square kilometers of dense Siberian forest had been scorched and flattened. There was, however, no crater.
Kulik's find revealed that colliding space debris could do a great deal of damage yet leave little long-term detectable evidence to indicate that an impact had occurred. Some implications of this fact were recognized by a few investigators almost immediately. Astronomer C.P. Olivier wrote of Kulik's discovery in the July 1928 issue of Scientific American:
"Many accounts of events in old chronicles that have been laughed at as fabrications are far less miraculous than this one, of which we seem to have undoubted confirmation. ... This meteoric fall happened in a region where there were no inhabitants. ... There is no known reason why the same could not happen in the United States."
Newly discovered impact craters were big news in the early thirties. Some large structures had been discovered in Australia (Henbury craters), and in 1932 British explorer James Philby was led to some impressive, recent craters in the Arabian desert (Wabar craters). His guide sang,
From Qariya strikes the sun upon the
... (1971 of 26295 Characters)
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