SYMHC Classics: Tunguska Event

This 2018 episode covers an even from June 30, 1908, when at approximately 7:15am, the sky over Siberia lit up with what was described by witnesses as a massive fireball, or the sky engulfed in fire. For the last century, scientists have been trying to figure out exactly what happened.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We have our latest installment of Unearthed coming
up on the show, and something that is getting a
brief mentioned in it is the Tunguska events. This was
a massive explosion that flattened a huge amount of pine
forest in Siberia in night and we covered it on
the show on June, So enjoy it as today's Saturday Classic.

(00:26):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. Uh. This
episode is a little bit of a history mystery. It's
also got a good bit of scientific work to counter

(00:48):
that mystery. But there's still that little slipper that remains
of uncertainty that keeps people guessing. Slash, I think interested
and also just hopeful that it will turn out to
be something crazy. Yeah, we are talking today about something
that I think a lot of people know a little
bit about. Uh. We'll talk about why at the end.
In terms of popular culture, which is the Tunguska event.

(01:11):
It's a strange phenomenon that happened in and there is
good news because while this was I think you could
categorize it as a catastrophic event. It is not really
a sad topic fortunately, as well discuss it a moment.
It happened in a place where people did not really
get hurt. There's one maybe unsubstantiated animals were harmed, but

(01:32):
probably not people. Yes, Uh, And I think probably what
happened to the animals happened so quickly there was not
really suffering. Uh. It is a fascinating look at the
ways in which our planet can surprise and mystify us
and offer up questions that we still can't answer even
after more than a hundred years of trying to figure
them out. Yeah. I think this is one that somebody

(01:53):
recently was like, I'm surprised you haven't talked about this.
I am surprised we haven't either. Like, I think I
had it in my head for a while, because it's
always something I'm like, oh, yeah, that is interesting. Surely
the previous hosts have done it, And even though we
have been here for a while, I would not put
any bets on my ability to conjure what has and
hasn't been covered by previous hosts. I also am never

(02:14):
surprised because it's the world is just so huge. Yes, yea.
So on June at approximately seven a m. The sky
over Siberia lit up with what was described by witnesses
as a massive fireball or the sky engulfed in fire.
And then there was a bang and a crash and

(02:36):
a series of smaller thunking noises like objects falling from
the sky. Yeah. But I want to make clear that
while it's described that way, we'll get we'll get to
the lack of those objects as we discuss. Uh. The
area around what is known as the Middle Tunguska River
in Siberia is not densely populated, and it was even

(02:56):
less so in nineteen o eight, which was a good thing.
Had there been more people in the area when the
largest explosion known to man and it still holds that
title took place, it would likely have resulted in a
massive loss of human life. I read one thing last
night that said something like if this had happened over London,
like the whole world would have really felt like a

(03:17):
much bigger impact, because it's almost impossible to calculate how
devastating it would have been. Um. There were some deaths,
which was primarily herds of reindeer. Uh. There was one
human who was allegedly flung against a tree and died.
That account is not substantiated. When this blast, which came

(03:38):
as a complete surprise, happened, it was felt across long distances.
Windows broke in homes that were as far away as
thirty five miles or sixty kilometers from the explosion, and
estimated two thousand square kilometers of forest were destroyed. Places
as far away as Great Britain felt the earth shaking,
and in places where people didn't perceive a rumbling seismographs

(04:00):
still picked up a wave of activity that actually circled
the globe. It registered a second time in Germany. Yes,
some accounts will say it circled the globe multiple times,
but uh the second time specifically is mentioned in one
of the researchers the early researchers report. So the estimated
power of this mystery explosion is really hard to comprehend,

(04:23):
and apparently it is just as hard to estimate. It
is often compared to the power of atomic bombs, but
with sources claiming it as anywhere from a hundred and
eighty five times more powerful than the bomb that fell
on Hiroshima to one thousand times more powerful. I witness
accounts are almost difficult to believe. They sound are like
the sorts of things that you would read about in

(04:44):
an apocalyptic novel. There were claims that allow to the
earth flying star flew across the sky and that a
pillar of fire trailed it. One witness said quote the
sky split into and fire appeared high and wide over
the forest. The split in the sky grew larger, and
the entire northern side was covered with fire. A man

(05:06):
who had been sitting on his porch forty miles away
from the epicenter of the event described the sensation that
his shirt had caught fire. Yes, so there's a lot
of heat, noise, visual fire. Fortunately, So just for clarity,
because we mentioned earlier that this did not really claim
a lot of human lives, and it was in a
fairly sparsely populated area. The major primary part of it,

(05:30):
we'll talk about this in a moment, happened over a
forest that was completely undeveloped, and so these eyewitnesses were
in homes and areas that were outside of that forest.
So that is why there are eyewitness accounts, but not
a lot of death and destruction in terms of human life.
There was a massive and I mean massive blast wave

(05:51):
of wind that followed the explosion that resulted in reports
that horses, even hundreds of kilometers away were unable to
remain standing hum and fences were simply blown around. But
this blast wave is also credited with extinguishing the fire
that came with the explosion. And maybe the most odd
were the accounts of things that happened in far distant

(06:12):
places following the blast and Great Britain, it was reported
that the sky remained bright into the night, so much
so that people could easily read outdoors and play cricket
in the dead of night. That same illumination covered the
rest of Europe in parts of Asia as well. Yeah,
and it went on for several days, which seems like
a completely strange and weird apocalyptic event. But even though

(06:36):
this startling thing had happened in the Tunguska area, no
one from the scientific community really went to check it out.
One would think that curious scientists and researchers would flock
to a location where such an unusual event had taken place,
But again, this took place in central Siberia, an area
notorious for having a harsh climate, making travel challenging. The

(06:58):
Middle Tunguska River areas impassively difficult winters, and it can
get really swampy in its warmer season, which offers a
whole separate set of challenges. In the early nineteen twenties,
mineralogist Leonid Kulik, who was the St. Petersburg Museum's chief
curator of their meteorite collection, had become deeply interested in

(07:18):
this strange event, and he spent the next several years
trying to get the government to agree to a research trip,
and finally in nine nearly two decades after this strange
explosion at Tunguska, while the Soviet Union was in power
at this point, because remember there had been a big
power shift in the area, Kulick and his team finally

(07:39):
traveled into the area to investigate, and even after two decades,
the damage was both extensive and very obvious. As Kulik
and his men approached the location where this explosion was
reported to have taken place, they saw that the trees
had been completely flattened. Leaning outward from the center of
the blast, this section of flattened fourrist was thirty one

(08:01):
miles or fifty kilometers wide, although it was not a
perfect circle, but more of an elongated shape that Kulik
would later describe as eccentric radial. Yes, sometimes you'll see
it described as almost like a kind of a deformed
butterfly shape as well. But Kulick did not find the
crater that he expected at the center of all of
that destruction. Instead, the trees there in what would be

(08:22):
the epicenter or stripped bare of foliage and bark. But
they stood upright. They're broken trunk still rising straight into
the air. He also anticipated finding remnants of a meteorite,
but none were recovered by his team. Kulick theorized the
lack of a crater and meteoric rock could be attributed
to the soft, mucky earth in the area, and that

(08:44):
whatever had hit it had sunk into the mucky ground.
He wrote about this theory and a report published by
the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. In addition to the
explosion itself, there was an aftermath of particular debris, which
Kulik described in the paper quote huge masses of the
finest substance sprayed by the meteorite in its flight through

(09:06):
the atmosphere and raised by the explosion in the Earth's
crust due to the cosmic speed of the impact of
the meteorite caused a heavy blanket of dust in the
upper layers of the atmosphere, and the formation at a
height from eighty three to eight kilometers of silvery clouds,
light clouds and dust screens on the ceiling and in
the lower layers of the stratosphere. Thus were produced those

(09:29):
remarkable phenomena called night dawns, which were of incomparable beauty.
These were observed on the day of the fall from
the place of its occurrence as far as Spain and
from Pheno Scandia to the Black Sea. We're going to
rewind a little bit to talk about some work that
Kulik actually did to try to get information before that trip,
but first we will pause for a sponsor break. Right

(10:01):
before the break, we read a little bit from Kulik's
report on all of this, and some of what he
wrote about actually had been published before. He had mounted
an expedition in n One that gathered accounts of the event,
but it didn't actually make it to the site. Uh.
That was how Leon and Kulik had first really gotten
a sense of what had happened at Tunguska. He kind

(10:23):
of again it's very impassable, difficult to get to. And
I will point out one more time, an undeveloped forests.
So it's not take a place where there are roads
and it's just hard to get over them. There wasn't
any way to get to places. It's not going to
have people passing by and seeing what happened, right, Uh.
And certainly there's no infrastructure there for him to just

(10:43):
put it all on the jeep and go. But most
scientists just did not take those accounts seriously. We talked
about all the time how eyewitness accounts aren't always trustworthy.
These were gathered some years after the event, so there's
already that passage of time that that makes already potentially
fallible memory even more fuzzy. Uh. And it just it

(11:04):
wasn't coming from scientists, it was coming from locals. But
because Kulik was also able to get ahold of seismic
wave data that confirmed that something certainly had happened in
Siberia in nineteen o eight, this event started to garner
more serious scientific interest. Kulick's writing on the subject of
the ten event was not the result of just one visit.

(11:25):
He went again in eight with an assistant he refers
to as a cinema operator, meaning a cameraman. The images
captured on the trip were so stark and startling that
they led to another expedition in nine. Yeah, if you
we will use one of those images as her show art.
But if you just look around on the internet for

(11:47):
like a tiny amount of time, you will see them.
They're astonishing. They really do look just completely alien and bizarre.
On the trip, Kulik was joined by a geobotanist named
Elvi Shumiliva and another scientists named E. L. Crin Off,
and they also had a group of workmen that traveled
with them over the course of a year and a half.
The numbers of of work when they had at any

(12:08):
given time varied a little bit, uh, but their mission
was basically to thoroughly study the area and its climate
and document everything was really detailed notes. Over the course
of the journey, the research team investigated points of interests
that might have proven pertinent to the nineteen o eight event.
There are a lot of side trips to look at
indentions in the earth and see if those might be

(12:29):
where debris fell, and they also carefully tracked the shifting
seasons to analyze if climate conditions may have contributed. Kula
wrote his conclusion as to what exactly had taken place. Quote,
we know that on June behind the Podkamanya, an enormous
iron meteorite fell. We may imagine that this body broke

(12:49):
into pieces, first in the air and then into the crust,
which it penetrated in a number of discrete fragments, and
that they're in the crust, these fragments burst into still
smaller paces under the action of the escaping incandescent gases
which were produced at the time. Yes, so he believed
that this meteorite had exploded in midair, which is why
there were no there was no crater, and that the

(13:12):
pieces that then slammed into the earth and went underground
also exploded some more, and that that basically broke them
up to the point that it was difficult. But he
did believe that you could potentially find large pieces of
nikoliferous iron down in the earth under the central point
of the explosion, and he thought those would be buried

(13:33):
less than eighty two feet that's about twenty five down.
So Kulis trips to Central Siberia provided previously unknown details
about the Tangooska events to the world outside of the
immediate area, but also opened up this whole Pandora's box
of questions about what really happened there and why there
was no impact. Crater. Series about Tunguska range from scientifically

(13:55):
supported and plausible to downright kukie. So we're going to
start off with some of the more out landish ones
and work our way up to the harder science explanations,
like how every history mystery ranges from right too, Oh
it was mold. How you started on like the most

(14:17):
bananas one and I started on the most straightforward one.
So uranium was discovered in seventeen eighty nine, and at
the end of the nineteenth century, experiments and nuclear energy
were really beginning in Earnest Ressus. St. Petersburg Academy of
Sciences started Earnest work in radioactive materials the year after

(14:38):
the Tangusca explosion. But there have been conspiracy theories that
have suggested that nuclear energy and specifically weapons further along
in the globe than the global public new in nineteen
o eight, and that some sort of nuclear explosion caused
this craterless Tunguska event. Yeah, that's one of those great
uh perfect storm theories of like, of course there's no

(15:00):
evidence it was all covered up and uh they didn't
know what they were doing yet because it was all
done in secret. Uh, there's really no There was no
radioactive uh material or measurement taken that would suggest that
that was the case. What again, is a history mystery
without the involvement of aliens as an explanation for strange events.

(15:22):
There have been a number of hoaxes where people claim
to have evidence of aliens landing it to Aungusca, and
sometimes the alien explanation and the nuclear explosion explanation are conflated.
They formed sort of a fun ven diagram uh, and
it becomes about a spaceship's nuclear power source malfunctioning and exploding.
But again, no radioactivity was measured to support any of these,

(15:44):
so probably both. Our favorite theory, even if we don't
believe it at all, is that this whole thing was
the result of Nicola Tesla losing control of a wireless
power transmitter he had been working on, which could also
serve as a death ray. This theory is based on
the idea that Tesla may have been attempting to contact
explore Robert Peary as he camped on Ellesmere Island preparing

(16:07):
to you attempt to reach the North Pole. Also, there's
just a lot of talk about Tesla developing a death ray. Also, Yeah,
and even some of Tesla's writing is a little uh
nutty enough that people can kind of pick and cherry
pick it a little bit to support these kinds of ideas.
It's not a death ray. I mean, I don't want

(16:28):
to shut anybody's dreams down, but I feel confident saying
this was not Nicola Tesla shooting a death ray. Now,
But even as all manner of fanciful explanations have surfaced
and even taken on lives of their own, scientists have
been working on this puzzle as well, and they have

(16:49):
come up with some additional theories, some building on the
ideas of Culic and others going in slightly different directions.
Another expedition went to the Tunguska site for additional research,
and this group found material that seems to support Kulik hypothesis.
They recovered nickel, heavy silicate and magnetite samples from the
ground at the site, which backed up this whole meteorite theory.

(17:11):
To create the kind of effect that happened at Tegusca,
Scientists have estimated that a meteorite would have had to
be somewhere between a hundred and fifty and three hundred
feet or between fifty and hundred meters in diameter. Yeah,
and those samples were teeny teeny tiny, Like, there's a reason,
just in case it's unclear where you're like, how come
they found samples and he didn't returning less than a
millimeter in size? They are itty bitty tiny. In a

(17:34):
paper published Detailing and expedition to the site in nine,
researcher KP. Florensky continued the meteorite hypothesis, but also knew
that this needed still more study, writing quote, the investigation
into the distribution of meteoric dust in the area of
the fall permits us with a high degree of probability

(17:54):
to speak of physically observed fragments from the Tunguska meteorite
and the nature of their scattering. However, to transform the
probability into full certainty, the distribution of this material must
be the subject of study in conjunction with the general
study of cosmic dust and its propagation. In three authors A. A.

(18:15):
Jackson the Fourth and MP Ryan Jr. Published a paper
in the periodical Nature putting forth the theory that the
Tanca event may have been the result of a tiny
black hole hitting the Earth, writing quote, Since the black
hole would leave no creator or a material residue, it
explains the mystery of the Tongus event. The following year,
Nature published another paper written by William H. Beasley and

(18:38):
Brian A. Tinsley the rather direct contradictory title of Tongus
event was not caused by a black hole. There are
a few instances of back and forth with these theories,
where the follow up written by somebody else's like no,
no girl, that was not a thing, No honey um
And as part of the takedown of that black hole theory,

(19:00):
Beasley intensely right quote the air blast could also have
resulted from the impact of a small black hole with
a diameter of the order of angstroms and an asteroidal mass.
The black hole would however, have passed through the Earth
in ten to fifteen minutes and caused a similar explosion
at the point of exit. For what it's worth, Jackson

(19:21):
and Ryan did point out in their own paper that
the quote exit proves a check on the whole hypothesis,
and they suggested that oceanographic and shipping records should be
consulted for anything that might suggest disturbances in the proper
exit point that would have happened in eight. In the
late nineteen seventies, things circle back around once again to
the idea that an object from space had been the

(19:43):
cause of the Tunguska event. And we're going to talk
about some of that research right after we come back
from another little sponsor break. In November, Krezac published a
paper in the Bulletin of the Astronomical Institutes of Czechoslovakia

(20:05):
asserting that the cause of the Tunguska event had been
a fragment of the comet Anka. Because comments are made
primarily of ice and not rock, this idea explained why
there would be no impact debris ever recovered from the site.
It would have just evaporated in the atmosphere. In two
thousand seven, Italian scientists put forth another reason why no
impact creator had ever been discovered. It had filled with

(20:27):
water and looked like any other lake. The lake in question,
like Checko, is, according to the Italian team, unrecorded before
the Tunguska event, and it has an unusual funnel like
shape to its bed that made the team think it
could actually be an impact creator. But there are a
lot of detractors to this whole theory, pointing out that
trees very near Lake Checko are mature and old enough

(20:49):
that they would have been flattened by such an event,
like the other trees in the area where. Yeah, and
then there's that thing where it's like it's in the
middle of Siberia, so there's lots of stuff it wasn't
mapped before them. Um, Yeah, that is not a popular one.
In samples from a layer of earth from Tunguska that

(21:10):
would have been settled there in nineteen o eight revealed
microscopic rock fragments that had indeed originated in a meteorite.
Even analysis doesn't entirely solve this mystery, though. For one,
it's not certain that all the fragments that they found
were actually from nineteen o eight, And for another, there
are anybody fragments of meteorites all over the planet, and

(21:31):
there's stuff from space hitting the planet literally all the time,
so even a positive idea of meteoric origin doesn't necessarily
rule out other possibilities, but it is still by far
the most substantiated explanation. Two more thoroughly work through the
exact steps to explain the century old riddle of Tungusca.
Scientists Natalia A. Artemieva and Valerie V. Shuvalov, in a

(21:54):
paper published in looked at two other incidents for comparisons
to Tungusca. One was the collision of comet shoemaker Levy
nine with Jupiter, and then the February Chilly A Bins comedia,
which exploded over Chillia Bins, Russia and blew out windows
over a two d square mile area. You may have

(22:16):
seen footage of that on YouTube. It is terrifying. So
their paper suggests that in the tung Goosek event number one,
a meteor zipped into earth atmosphere, chugging along somewhere between
nine and ten miles per second. Number two, the incoming
object was broken apart in the atmosphere, and number three,
the rock, which had to have been very brittle, broke
into teeny tiny vapor like particles that flash burned in

(22:39):
the atmosphere. That air burst would have been like a
massive bomb going off, creating an impact of force that
slammed into the ground leveled trees and left that particulate
matter in the atmosphere, which explains that strange silver sky
event sort of reported in witness accounts, and that account
we mentioned earlier about the sky i in Britain being

(23:00):
bright enough for a cricket match. It is believed that
that strange nighttime light phenomenon was the result of some
light reflecting off of scattered dust in the atmosphere which
could have come from Earth kicked up from the planet's surface,
and from the meteorite breaking up into the finest particles.
This really goes back to Kulik's early work. So this
is one of those history mysteries that continues to capture

(23:21):
the attention of the scientific community as they strive to
find really conclusive data that points with one certainty to
the exact cause of the event. It's difficult because we
have a sample set of exactly one. There has not
been another event on this scale and in recorded time
for researchers to compare it to. We we do know

(23:42):
of other massive meteorites hitting the Earth, but like once,
we're okay, there's the obvious craters right there, Nothing quite
like this at this massive scale has happened. But incidentally, though,
it is estimated that Earth takes a hit from an
asteroid the size of the one that most likely hit
Tunguska about every three years, so we might have another
data point soon. In the meantime, though, if you'd like

(24:03):
to explore the Tunguska Event from a more fictional perspective,
you've got lots of options. Even though there are as
plenty of scientific work focusing on explaining and understanding what
happened in Siberia, the remaining mystery is enough to fuel
all kinds of fictional versions of the Tunguska Event. Yeah,
that's probably how many people have heard of it. When

(24:24):
I mentioned it to my husband, he brought up immediately. Oh,
they talked about that on the X Files, and they did.
It has also been mentioned on Dr Who, on Star Trek,
It's mentioned in the movie Hellboy. I mean, there is
a list a mile long of things that have used
the Tunguska Event as a part of fiction. It even

(24:45):
shows up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer at one point,
although they get the details of it wrong, Like Willow
mentions it and I think she says it happened in
nineteen seventeen, which would have been the Bolshevik Revolution and
not this um. But so it really is kind of pervasive.
I think in nerd circles. It's almost like shorthand of
like a fun kind of paranormally thing, but not really

(25:06):
like most people recognize the science. But if you read
the comic that told the prequel story of Transformers, Dark
of the Mood, you know the real story of Tungusca,
which is that it was caused by the Decepticon shockwave.
That's what I'm gonna stick to. I've not seen that so,
but I do know what a Transformer is and a

(25:27):
Decepticon yeah, uh yeah, and again it you'd have to
read the comic that like the supplemental material, it's not
in the movie. The movie doesn't. I don't think the
movie touches on it. I honestly don't know. I'm not
having no idea. The hugest fan of the Transformers movies. Um,
but I did see that comic because someone mentioned that
it had this event in it. They so much for

(25:53):
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive. If you heard an email address or
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course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our
current email address is History podcast at i heart radio
dot com. Our old how stuff Works email address no
longer works, and you can find us all over social

(26:14):
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(26:36):
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