Meteorites

June 30, 1908: In the midst of a powerful explossion in the atmosphere, almost 1,000 square kilometers of forest were suddenly flattened. A meteorite exploded some six miles (8 km) over the Tunguska River, in central Siberia, releasing 10 to 20 megatons.

The cataclysmic detonations were heard at least 600 miles away. The air shock wave circled twice the Earth. The data recorded as far away as England can be interpreted in an analogous way as modern records are used to estimate the strengths of atomic weapons tests in the atmosphere. Troughout western Europe newspapers could easily be read during the followig night, because the light-reflecting dust high in the atmosphere.

Outside the local region in Siberia, the Tunguska explosion remained nearly unknown for more than a decade. In the interim, Russia was wracked by world war and revolution.

1921: Leonid A. Kulik, a researcher from the Mineralogical Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is preparing the first russian expedition for meteorite search. By chance, he reads an article form a 1908 issue of Siberian Life, found in the back of a torn page from a 1910 St. Petersburg calendar. The article included eyewitness reports of the fall of a great meteorite somewhere near the Tunguska River. Kulik investigates and find that a number of Siberian newspapers contained stories about the fall. By September, more than 13 years after the event, Kulik is distributing questionnaries and collecting reports from witnesses of the great explossion. The location of the Tuguska fall lay some 700 km north of the nearest rail line.

April, 1927: two months after leaving Leningrad, Kulik reaches the southern boundary of the region of devastated forest. He writes in his diary:

I still cannot sort out my chaotic impressions of this excursion. In the north the distant hills along the River Kushmo are covered with a white shroud of snow half a meter thick. From our observation point no sign of forest can be seen, for everything has been devastated and burned, and around the edge of this dead area the young twenty-year-old forest growth has moved forward furiously, seeking sunshine and life. One has an uncanny feeling when one sees 20-30 inch thick giant trees snapped across like twigs, and their tops hurled many meters away to the south.

June, 1927: Kulik has found the epicenter of the destruction. The journey trough the forest wasteland has not been without peril:

In the early part of the day when the wind rose, it was very dangerous to walk throug the old dead forest; twenty-year-old dead giants rotted at the roots were falling down on all sides. Sometimes they fell quite close to us. As we went along we kept our eyes on the tree-tops so that, if they fell, we should have time to jump aside.

1928 and following: Kulik leads new expeditions, even wintering over at the site. But no craters or meteorite fragments are located: only some microtektites, and thousands of trees crashed and burned.

1942: Kulik dies after being taken prisoner by the German army in World War II.