Ever since I wrote Collision Course! Cosmic Impacts and Life on Earth in 2001, I have been updating a webpage that discusses various cosmic impact events.
I just added news about research that connects the origin of a small Siberian lake to the famous Tunguska impact event of 1908.
Here’s what I wrote there:
Italian Research Team Claims to Have Found Crater from Tunguska Impact Event
Collision Course! has a chapter devoted to the famous Tunguska Event of 1908 in which a small comet or asteroid is suspected of causing the devastation of a forested area of Siberia. One of the continuing mysteries about that event is that no one has found even a fragment of the impactor. Now, according to a National Geographic report, a team of Italian researchers have found evidence that a small lake, known as Lake Cheko, was formed when a piece of the supposed space object broke off and plowed into the mud near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. The event killed two people and wiped out entire herds of reindeer in that area.
The researchers plan another expedition to the lake in 2008 to sample its sediments and search its bottom for pieces of the as yet undiscovered impactor from outer space.
A fun theory, regrettably dead wrong, and for the simplest of reasons: Contemporary eyewitness accounts show that Lake Cheko was there long before the Tunguska Event, hence could not have been an “impact crater” formed in the Event.
Check out: http://www.vurdalak.com/askjack/askjack_q06.htm for the damning details.