This article was originally published on WHerMoments
In the wake of any disaster, one of society's first steps to recovery is piecing together what happened. People need to find some explanation or cause in order to process the catastrophe. But what if such an event seems like it came out of nowhere? One scorching calamity changed the Russian landscape forever. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, and even the brightest minds in the world struggled to find the cause. Even stranger, the more information they gathered from the site, the deeper this mystery grew.
Extensive damage
In 2013, the calm morning in Chelyabinsk, Russia, turned into an inferno. The incident only took a few seconds. An illuminated streak, brighter than the sun, tore through the sky and sent a devastating shock wave through the region.
The aerial explosion caused massive damage to the town and injured well over a thousand people. Yet, they considered themselves lucky. A far more devastating case from a century earlier nearly wiped out their way of life.
The Tunguska event
The morning of June 30th, 1908, Emperor Nicolas II of Russia received a jaw-dropping piece of news. Apparently, an ungodly explosion blasted across miles of Siberian forest near the Tunguska River. As far as authorities could tell, it wasn't an attack by their German or Japanese enemies.
Nobody knew quite how to describe it, so the incident became known as the "Tunguska event." The scope of the damage was hard to measure. The most obvious consequence was hundreds of square miles flattened — trees snapped in half like twigs.
Bright lights
No cameras managed to capture the event, so the Russian government had to rely on the handful of eyewitness accounts available. Their hands shaking, peasants from remote villages recalled the stunning details of that night.
A local newspaper collected their unbelievable accounts. They reported being awoken by "some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards." Then, unbearably loud claps of thunder rolled in.
Continental impact
"At that moment I felt a great heat as if my shirt had caught fire," one man recalled. "I was thrown on the ground and for a moment I lost consciousness." He survived relatively unscathed, but three people in the area were never seen again.
Though the fallout was most traumatic for those near the center of the Siberian blast, the night sky lit up all over Asia. All the way over in London, scientists picked up on unusual seismic activity that coincided with the flash.
Baffled officials
Modern experts calculated that the Tunguska event topped 15 megatons, meaning that it matched the energy of about a thousand of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. But where did it come from?
The Russian government was at a total loss. They intended to send a team of scientists to investigate the site, but it was too remote to reach at the time. However, the native Evenki people had a troubling opinion on the matter.
Studying the crater
Eying the destruction, they spread the rumor that their god Ogdy came down to Earth and smote the forest in a fury. This was the best explanation anyone could come up with until an official expedition finally came together twenty years later.
In 1927, mineralogist Leonid Kulik led a team of researchers and Evenski guides to the center of the blast radius. One of the top minds in his field, he believed he had a scientific explanation for that fateful morning.
Seeking proof
Kulik theorized that the aerial explosion was the result of a meteor crashing through the atmosphere. It could explain the bright lights, the heat, and the sonic boom. All Kulik needed was a bit of proof.
Though the scientific community's knowledge of outer space was limited at the time, they had studied meteorite impacts in other parts of the world. The telltale sign of such a collision was a crater, which could span hundreds of miles in diameter.
Samples from the blast
Kulik's team ventured into the Siberian wasteland, following the fallen trees to the middle of the site. Finally, they came to a huge clearing. They estimated it was near the center of the blast, but there was no sign of any impact.
The scientists gathered mineral samples from the soil — perhaps an extraterrestrial body had broken up into tiny fragments upon entry. None of their results, however, showed that these rocks matched the composition of a meteor. Kulik was stumped.
Lasting evidence
Despite his best efforts, Kulik never cracked the Tunguska case. Subsequent generations of scientists examined the site and claimed to have found particles of a meteorite scattered around the area. But there are other theories floating around.
Many scientists assert that an icy comet caused the Tunguska event. But German astrophysicist Wolfgang Kundt rejected the idea that the answer came from outer space. Instead, he explained that a massive leak of natural gas was the perpetrator.
Koryak Mountains
We may never know exactly what caused the Tunguska event. A giant clearing still remains in the middle of Siberia, which indicates that it could have been the largest impact in recorded history. And could that event have introduced something foreign into the environment? Well, another historic impact in Russia gave scientists the chance to study the interior of extraterrestrial objects.
Researchers could hardly believe their luck in actually locating the specimen. The circumference of the entire planet is just under 25,000 miles, which seems massive. And yet they stumbled upon one strange object. Getting to it was far from easy.
Impact Crater
In 2011, a meteorite named Khatyrka landed in the Koryak Mountains of eastern Siberia. While the landing site was incredibly remote, scientists were soon making their way to Russia to investigate.
Given the fact that meteorites literally come from outer space, they almost always have scientific value. Each impact crater provides a new opportunity for discovery; it's like Christmas morning for an astronomer.
Comparing Samples
But in this case, scientists didn't find any massive meteorites. They did manage to remove a few shards of interstellar material from the clay-like soil. Those pieces, however, still proved to be significant.
Analysis showed that the shards consisted of a mineral containing isotopes of oxygen and other particles. The scientists weren't quite sure what to make of this discovery, but they decided to press ahead with further testing.
Crystals Inside
The oldest meteorites have been dated to over four billion years ago; even the newest ones, which come from the moon, are around three billion years old. However, the scientists would find something even more notable than the sample's age.
Upon examining the ancient mineral, they noticed something structurally unusual. These samples were clearly different than what was normally found in a meteorite. There was a different shape under the microscope.
Erratic Patterns
They found crystals. And while you may think of crystals as something pretty to observe in a cave or add to an engagement ring, they're scientifically significant, too.
Crystals are defined by a regular, predictable atomic structure. Those lattice patterns are then repeated over and over, creating the glass-like material that we're all familiar with. But this crystal was different.
Quasicrystals
While the crystals within the meteorite had the traditional lattice structure, they didn't repeat in a consistent manner. Instead, unlike anything found on Earth, the connections fell into uneven patterns.
Slowly, the scientists realized what they were seeing. This alien pattern had never been produced naturally, but it had been studied before! Things were starting to make sense.
Bizarre Ratios
These were quasicrystals! While they had been produced by scientists since the 1960s, they had never been found in nature. In fact, some researchers even doubted they could exist outside of a lab.
Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Princeton University, always believed that quasicrystals could form naturally. He recognized this meteorite as a massive chance to confirm his hypothesis.
Breakthrough
He and his team looked at the particles in the crystal and noticed something bizarre. The ratio of oxygen isotopes to other isotopes was way off. Slowly, they realized what it meant.
They were looking at a new mineral that was not from this planet! The crystals were created in the high-pressure environment of outer space years before crashing down in Russia.
More Evidence
The discovery proved Steinhardt partially right. While the quasicrystals weren't formed on Earth, they were capable of existing in nature. It might not have been a full confirmation, but it was still a major scientific breakthrough.
“The finding is important evidence that quasicrystals can form in nature under astrophysical conditions," he said. "And provides evidence that this phase of matter can remain stable over billions of years.” But Steinhardt wasn't done. He and his team were able to recover a few more samples of the meteorite and find two additional examples of quasicrystals.