Syzdekistan

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska explosion. For those of you who weren’t in remotest Siberia 100 years ago, this was the most recent large meteor impact on earth (link) (illustration). It is very interesting that no meteorite fragments were found but searches for fragments continue.

A column of bluish light as bright as the Sun streaked through cloudless skies above the Taiga forest. Minutes later, local herdsmen and recent settlers saw a brilliant flash followed by the sound of explosions, like an artillery barrage from a great battle raging over the horizon. An ashen cloud rose in the distance, and could be seen from hundreds of miles away. And then – silence.

The place: the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in central Siberia, northeast of Lake Baikal; the time: 7:14 a.m. on the morning of June 30, 1908. Within minutes the “Tunguska Event,” the largest asteroid impact in modern recorded history, was over.

Times were hard in Russia at the turn of the last century, with wars, revolutions, and civil war following each other in quick succession. And so it was not until 1927 that a Soviet scientific expedition led by Leonid Kulik arrived at the Tunguska site. What it found was a landscape of devastation: millions of trees from the taiga forest were uprooted for miles around, all pointing away from the apparent point of impact. Overall, Kulik estimated, 2150 square kilometers (830 square miles) of forest were flattened, or a circle of 25 kilometers around the epicenter.

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