Tsar Bomba Crater: Where Is It Located?

Tsar Bomba is the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. It was so strong that many were wondering where its crater was.

Tsar Bomba Crater

On. Oct. 30, 1961, Major Andrei E. Durnotsev piloted a specially modified Tu-95 release aircraft to transport the Tsar Bomba to its test location from an airstrip on the Kola peninsula. The bomb has the byname RDS-220 and is also called Big Ivan. It was developed by the Soviet Union, per Britannica.

The video stills used to illustrate this and other articles on the test were captured when a Tu-16 observer plane flew alongside the release plane to collect air samples and record the test. To prevent heat damage, both aircraft were painted with a unique reflecting white paint, according to McGill University.

The 27-tonne weapon was 8 meters long by 2 meters in diameter. It was so big that the Tu-95's bomb bay doors and wing fuel tanks had to be removed.

Due to the bomb's attachment to an 800-kilogram fall retardation parachute, the release and observer planes had enough time to fly 45 kilometers from the explosion site. If there had been no such delay, the bomb would have detonated at its intended altitude too quickly, turning the test into a suicide mission, or it would have crashed into the ground soon, with unexpected repercussions.

On Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea, north of the Arctic Circle, and approximately at 73.85° N 54.50° E, over the Mityushikha Bay nuclear testing range (Sukhoy Nos Zone C), the Tsar Bomba exploded at 11:32 a.m. The bomb was dropped from 10,500 meters, and barometer sensors were used to time the explosion at 4,000 meters above the ground (or 4,200 meters above sea level).

Khrushchev warned that there existed a 100 Mt bomb in a speech that was recorded to the Communist parliament. The first USA yield estimate was 57 Mt, but since 1991 all Russian sources have maintained that it is "only" 50 Mt.

According to Lyle McElhaney, a self-employed software engineer, there's no crater after the detonation. The bomb was detonated 4 kilometers high, and the ground reflection kept it from intruding on the rock.

Scott Hanson, a former Electronic Warfare Technician at United States Navy (USN) from 1990 to 1994, shared the same sentiment as McElhaney. He said there was no crater because the detonation was an "air burst."

Due to this, there are no details about the Tsar Bomba radius map.

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What Happened During The Tsar Bomba Detonation?

The explosion was extraordinarily strong-over, 1,570 times stronger than the combined power of the two bombs detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The mushroom cloud produced by the Tsar Bomba was 25 miles broad at its base and nearly 60 miles wide at its peak, producing a yield of 50 megatons, which was ten times more powerful than all the explosives used in World War II combined, according to The National WWII Museum.

It entered the stratosphere at a height of 40 miles. Everything within a 30-mile radius of the hit was destroyed. At the same time, substantial damage was sustained over a 150-mile radius, enough to kill any major city in the contemporary era, including its suburbs. The intensity of the bomb broke windows in distant countries, including Norway and Finland.