1. UNSOLVED: The Tunguska event
One hundred and two years ago, there was a very loud kaboom over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, and hundreds of trees decided to lie down. The night sky lit up because dense clouds reflected sunlight from beyond the horizon, and people in the farthest reaches of Asia reported being able to read perfectly in the outside light. The blast was 185 times the strength of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, and completely decimated the surrounding area. Even a man 40 miles away was blown over by the blast. The trees closest to the center of the explosion were still standing upright but were stripped of branches and bark. This implies that the energy was so high, that there was no time for any of it to be transferred to the trunk of the tree before it moved on.
No one knows exactly what happened at 7:17 a.m. on June 30, 1908. There is no impact crater. The general consensus among scientists seems to be that a giant asteroid entered the earth’s atmosphere, was subjected to intense heat and pressure and annihilated itself 28,000 feet above ground.
My favorite sci-fi author, Spider Robinson, might be the only man alive who knows the truth — it was just Nikola Tesla trying to send a message via death ray.
2. UNSOLVED: The wonky wandering rocks of Death Valley
In the lowest point of North America, better known as Death Valley National Park, rocks move, sometimes at walking speed. You can see their trails in the Racetrack — a dried up lake bed between the Cottonwood Mountains and the Last Chance Range. No one has ever seen the rocks physically move, but the evidence is clear in their long tracks on the dry, dusty ground, sometimes stretching up to 860 feet. Scientists, to say the least are baffled and have been baffled since the 1940s. Because the park is a federally protected area, there is limited access for scientists, and disturbing the rocks is severely prohibited.
Still, there is at least one plausible-sounding guess. Principle investigator Cynthia Cheung hypothesizes that in the winter, water from the surrounding hills freeze “collars” around the rocks, which let them slide down into the playa, carving tracks as they go. Using tiny sensors under the soil, several graduate and undergraduate students working on the project found that freezing temperatures in March could form the right conditions for this sliding to happen.
Or, you know, it could be ghosts playing a really slow game of marbles. I’d be happy with either explanation.
3. SORTA SOLVED: Honeybee apocalypse
According to Discover Magazine, a third of all commercial honeybees have died each year since 2006. This isn’t like the usual widespread deaths of honeybees. This time it seems that bees are just up and leaving their hives — something that is completely unheard of in the bee world. In some cases, dead bees are left behind in and around the hive. Scientists have named the phenomenon colony collapse disorder. Lots of hypotheses have been considered: bacteria, pesticides, predation, but at this point no smoking gun has been found to explain the massive death and disappearance of honeybees. The fact that other insects avoid a collapsed colony seems to indicate it’s something contagious like a virus. Organic beekeepers have reported few problems with the disorder, leading scientists to believe that to save the industry, it needs to get greener.
Of course, all the Doctor Who junkies know exactly why the bees are disappearing. They’re going to back to their home planet of Melissa Majoria, because they know something bad is about to happen.
4. SOLVED: The mystery of maple-y Manhattan
In late October 2005, an unusual smell drifted over Manhattan — syrup. So many calls came in to local environmental agencies, the NYPD and the fire department from worried residents who feared it could be a bioterrorist attack disguised as something sweet, they decided to investigate. Hours later, nothing harmful had been found in the air, and the smell faded. Then it came back around 1 a.m. By January 2009, the sweet, syrupy smell had come and gone three more times, baffling everyone in various parts of New York and New Jersey. The smell had been investigated numerous times, but no discoveries were made.
What was causing the Eggo-air? It turned out that a food flavors and fragrance manufacturing facility in North Bergen, N.J., has been processing seeds of an herb, fenugreek, that produce a maple-syrupy smell. Fenugreek’s seeds have a compound called solotom that creates the aroma of maple syrup, which is why the seeds are often used in imitation syrup flavoring.
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