* Blogmanac | June 30, 1908 | The Tunguska mystery

7:17 am A giant fireball impacted in Central Siberia (the Tunguska Event). The mass of the unidentified object has been estimated at around 90,000 tonnes (about 100,000 tons) and the force of the explosion at 40 megatons of TNT. This is 2,000 times the force of the bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. Even today, the exact cause of the explosion is unknown.

As old photographs show, and modern research confirms, an area as big as a large city had all its trees flattened by the awesome blast. The ‘event’ was so enormous that it has been estimated that had such an explosion occurred over Europe instead of the sparsely populated region of Siberia, the number of human victims might have been 500,000 or more.

Surprisingly, scientists of the day showed little interst in this extraordinary event and its consequences. Russia for the first two decades of the 20th Century was embroiled in war, revolution, and civil war, so it wasn't until the 1920s that anyone performed a serious investigation of what had happened on that fateful day at Tunguska.

Then, in 1921, the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, surveying meteorite locations for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, visited the Podkamennay Tunguska River basin, where he knew from his research that something big had occurred in 1908. Here, locals told him of the great blast years earlier that had knocked people over, flattened huts and blown away roofs in its wind. Some people had been deafened and become ill or been injured. Kulik managed to persuade the Soviet government to fund an expedition to the Tunguska region. Things moved slowly in those days, especially in the Soviet union, and Tunguska even today is hundreds of kilometres from a major road, so it was not until 1927 that Kulik’s team reached the region, where, much to their surprise, there was no crater, just a large region of scorched and flattened trees.


Pictured: Leonid Kulik

Family’s experience
People that they interviewed reported that for weeks around June 30th, 1908, they were able to read at night due to the lighting up of the sky, and the blast was felt for more than 80 kilometres (about 50 miles). Ethnographer IM Suslov interviewed a family who had been sleeping 40 km (about 25 miles) southeast of the blast site when the event occurred:

“The entire group was thrown down by the force of the blast and several knocked unconscious. The wife reported that when they awoke they found ‘...the forest blazing around them with many fallen trees. There was also a great noise." Some of the children described ‘A terrible storm,’ Suslov continued, ‘So great it was difficult to stand upright in it, [that] blew down the trees near their hut.’” Source

Microbarograph records show that the atmospheric shock wave from the blast twice circled the earth. A loss of transparency in the atmosphere was recorded in the United States by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and California's Mount Wilson Observatory.


Unsolved questions
Suggestions that the object was an asteroid raise the question of the lack of crater or stony fragments left at Ground Zero. Instead, what was left at Tunguska was an impact zone 50 kilometres (about 30 miles) in diameter – and many thousands of flattened trees.

There is another question to ponder: in the 1960s, investigators identified four smaller epicentres within the larger, each with its own radial pattern of fallen trees, and each presumably caused by individual explosions during the whole event.

Was this catastrophic event just a one-off? No, according to Russian Academician Vasiliev, who is on record as having said: “The Tunguska episode marks the only event in the history of civilization when Earth has collided with a truly large celestial object, although innumerable such collisions have occurred in the geological past. And many more are bound to occur.”

Return to Tunguska (1999)


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