On the morning of 30 June 1908, an asteroid or comet fragment exploded above the Siberian taiga. How large was the area of forest the blast flattened?
About 2,150 square kilometres of forest were flattened in a radial pattern — roughly the area of greater London, or about a third the area of Rhode Island. The blast left no crater because the object exploded in the atmosphere at about 5–10 km altitude rather than impacting the ground. About 80 million trees were flattened. The first scientific expedition (Leonid Kulik's, 1927) reached the site nineteen years after the event because the Russian Revolution and its aftermath had occupied substantial governmental attention in the interval. The Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013 was about a thirtieth the size of Tunguska.
Read the full story →On 30 June 1908 something exploded above central Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It took the first scientists nineteen years to reach the site.
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