You're listening to the skeptics guide to the universe. Your escape to reality.

Hello and welcome to the skeptics guide to the universe. Today is Monday June 25th, 2012,

and this is your host, Steven Novella. Join me this week or Bob Novella.

Hey everybody, Rebecca Watson. Hello everyone.

Hey, Noah Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Burnstein. Hey, hey, hey. What's happening?

What's happening? Everybody run. The Hectomorph. The Endomorph and the Mesomorph.

Gosh, that must have been deeply stored somewhere in my brain. I can't believe I pulled that out.

Well guess what was happening 104 years ago today?

What was happening 104 years ago today?

The great big space cabloi?

I would not know what I would say, a space cabloic is technically a cabloid in the Earth's atmosphere, but yes.

On June 30th, 1908, something exploded near the Tanngisca River in Russia.

And that is most likely to have been a meteoroid that exploded in mid-air,

and left a ton of trees leveled and on fire and then stripped, of course,

to 80 million trees, by the way. Lots of trees.

That's a good factoid. I have a few more.

The explosion was approximately 1000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima.

Much less deadly though. I found a website that said it was equivalent to 185 Hiroshima bombs.

Somewhere in there. Yeah, but it's big. It's a big explosion.

Maybe a thousand Nagasaki bombs. And in some places, the shock wave would have been equivalent to an earthquake of 5.0 on the Richter scale.

Wow. Wow. I think it means magnitude scale on the Richter.

The area of leveled forest was about 2000 square kilometers or about 800 square miles.

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