The 10 Biggest Explosions in the History of the World (3 of 6)

4. Tunguska Meteor Explosion

One summer morning in 1908, a mysterious explosion lit up the skies over Siberia, flattening around 500,000 acres of forest, which is roughly half the area of Rhode Island. Scientists believe it was caused by some kind of space rock, either an asteroid or a comet, about 65 feet across and weighing over 185,000 tons. The blast’s force may have been equal to about 4 million tons of TNT, roughly 250 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. To this day, the Tunguska explosion remains one of the biggest cosmic mysteries, as no impact crater was ever found, which makes no sense at all. Unless… aliens?

5. The Halifax Explosion

The Belgian ship Imo and the French cargo ship Mont-Blanc, loaded with World War I explosives, collided in Halifax Harbor, Canada, in December 1917. The collision set off a tremendous explosion equivalent to about 3,000 tons of TNT. A white mushroom cloud soared 20,000 feet into the sky, and then a tsunami with waves as high as sixty feet washed ashore. The city was reduced to rubble within 1.2 miles. It was the biggest unintentional man-made explosion in history, with about 2,000 fatalities and 9,000 injuries.