There is news out that 100 years after some object slammed into the Siberian wilderness the source of the Tungaska Incident may finally have been discovered:

n late June of 1908, a fireball exploded above the remote Russian forests of Tunguska, Siberia, flattening more than 800 square miles of trees. Researchers think a meteor was responsible for the devastation, but neither its fragments nor any impact craters have been discovered.

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Italian researchers now think they’ve found a smoking gun: The 164-foot-deep Lake Cheko, located just 5 miles northwest of the epicenter of destruction.

“When we looked at the bottom of the lake, we measured seismic waves reflecting off of something,” said Giuseppe Longo, a physicist at the University of Bologna in Italy and co-author of the study. “Nobody has found this before. We can only explain that and the shape of the lake as a low-velocity impact crater.”

Should the team turn up conclusive evidence of an asteroid or comet on a later expedition, when they obtain a deeper core sample beneath the lake, remaining mysteries surrounding the Tunguska event may be solved.

I have always had my doubts that something which flattened so many trees would not leave any remnants on the surface of Earth. The physics would seem to show that to get that far through our atmosphere the object could not be all ice and still have the explosive power. The problem as always been the peat-bog nature of the area. It seems to suck things up. It makes sense that there is an impact crater someplace. And soon we will now. Just remember this new scientific breakthrough when thinking about global warming. This was just a small impact, and science still couldn’t figure it out. We are not omnipotent, and because of that we are explorers. And we have billions of life time’s worth of exploring still ahead of us.