A century later scientists still at odds on Tunguska Event explanation

More than 100 years have passed since the Tunguska Meteorite Event and the mystery of its occurrence remains unsolved, but scientists have not given up on solving the riddle. This July, an international research group from Italy and the United States ventured into deepest Siberia to investigate the most likely explanations of the mysterious event, and RIA Novosti correspondent David Burghardt joined them.

On June 30, 1908, Eastern Siberia was hit by an explosion equal to 2,000 times the nuclear bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945, destroying 2,200 square kilometers of taiga and flattening tens of millions of trees. If this impact had occurred four hours later, the city of St. Petersburg and other nearby villages would have been wiped off the face of the earth.

Some 15 hours after the devastating impact, the skies throughout Europe were lit up for several nights and white nights were noted in places that had never experienced such a phenomenon. Witnesses at the time in Britain, Denmark and Germany said they were able to read a newspaper in the middle of the night without using any artificial light.


It was not until the winter of 1927-1928 that the first expedition was organized to investigate reports from witnesses of the event. The expedition was led by Russian scientist Leonid Kulik, who headed for the epicenter in search for the meteorite he believed was the only possible explanation for the event. Travel back then to such a remote area was a very expensive and grueling affair, taking first a train to Krasnoyarsk in Eastern Siberia, and then traveling north on foot for hundreds of kilometers. Kulik’s first expedition 19 years after the event enlisted numerous native Evenki guides and dozens of reindeer. Kulik, like hundreds of scientists after him, found no traces of a meteorite.

Travel to the area today is much easier than in Kulik’s time, taking an airplane from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk, then a small prop plane to the village of Vanavara, and finally a Russian Mi-8 cargo helicopter into the region of the epicenter.

The two-week expedition included six professors from the University of Bologna, the University of Florence, and Cornell University.

There are some 100 theories of the Tunguska Event, including some of the more bizarre ones of a UFO crash site, a WWII bomber caught in a time warp and returning to 1908, Earth crossing through a black hole, and a cloud of mosquitoes that spontaneously combusted due to heat created by flying too densely.

The first theory was created in 1908 by native Evenki tribes in Eastern Siberia who were the actual witnesses of the event. According to their legend, the fire god, Agdy, became angered and destroyed all that was living in the area. Witnesses said there were several deafening explosions and trees were heard falling thousands of miles away.

The researchers looked at two of the most probable theories: meteorite impact and volcanic gas vent explosion. The scientific expedition was divided into two camps, one at Lake Cheko, where they were researching the meteorite theory, and the other at Kulik’s Cabin near the epicenter (some 10 kilometers from the first group), where they were researching geological explanations for the blast.

sections: Hi-Tech