The Tunguska Event

On June 30, 1908 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 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry 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

(00:22):
that mystery. But there's still that little slip her 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. Right. 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

(00:44):
Tunguska event. 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 we'll discuss the moment.
It happened in a place where people did not really
get hurt. There's one maybe unsubstantiated animals were harmed, but

(01:06):
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

(01:28):
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

(01:49):
surprised because it's the world is just so huge, yes, yea.
So on n at approximately seven am, the guy 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 a

(02:10):
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 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 less so in nineteen

(02:31):
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 much bigger

(02:52):
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 as a

(03:13):
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 still

(03:35):
picked up a wave of activity that actually circled the globe.
It registered a second time in Germany YEA. 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, and apparently

(03:59):
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 were like the sorts
of things that you would read about in an apocalyptic novel.

(04:21):
There were claims that a low 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 who had

(04:41):
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.

(05:03):
The major primary part of it, 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

(05:23):
and I mean massive blast wave of wind that followed
the explosion that resulted in reports that horses, even hundreds
of kilometers away were unable to remain standing. Humans 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

(05:45):
that happened in far distant 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

(06:08):
apocalyptic event. But even though 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

(06:29):
a harsh climate, making travel challenging. The Middle Tunguska River
area has 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

(06:49):
meteorite collection, had become deeply interested in this strange event,
and he spent the next several years trying to get
the government to agree to a research trip. Finally, in
ninety seven, nearly two decades after this strange explosion at Tunguska,
while the Soviet Union was in power at this point,
because you remember, there had been a big power shift

(07:11):
in the area, Kulick and his team finally 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,

(07:33):
the section of flattened forest was thirty one 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 Kulik did not find the crater that
he expected at the center of all of that destruction. Instead,

(07:56):
the trees there in what would be the epicenter or
stripped bare of foliage and arc. But they stood upright.
They're broken trunks, still rising straight into the air. He
also anticipated finding remnants of a meteorite, but none were
recovered by his team. Theorized the lack of a crater
and meteoric rock can be attributed to the soft, mucky

(08:17):
earth in the area, and that 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

(08:39):
the meteorite in its flight through 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 five kilometers of silvery clouds, light clouds and dust
screens on the sea ling and in the lower layers

(09:01):
of the stratosphere. Thus were produced those 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 Fenno, 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

(09:24):
we will pause for a sponsor break. Right 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
nineteen twenty one that gathered accounts of the event, but

(09:47):
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 of again,
it's very impassable, difficult to get to and I will
point out when more time and 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

(10:09):
passing by and seeing what happened. Right. Uh. And certainly
there's no infrastructure there for him to just 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

(10:33):
even more fuzzy. Uh. And it just it 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. Culick's writing on the subject of the event

(10:56):
was not the result of just one visit. 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 Yeah, if you we will use
one of those images as our show art. But if

(11:17):
you just look around on the internet for 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 Lvi
Shumiliva and another scientist 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.

(11:38):
The numbers of of work when they had at any
given time varied a little bit um, 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

(12:00):
intensions in the earth and see if those might be
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 Tung, an
enormous iron meteorite fell. We may imagine that this body

(12:21):
broke into pieces, first in the air and then into
the earth crust, which it penetrated in a number of
discrete fragments, and that they're in the crust. These fragments
burst into still smaller pieces 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,

(12:44):
and that the 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 nicolae is iron down in the earth under
the central point of the explosion, and he thought those

(13:04):
would be buried less than eighty two ft that's about
twenty five down. So kulis trips to central Siberia provided
previously unknown details about the Tangoska event 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

(13:26):
range from scientifically supported and plausible to downright kukie. So
we're going to start off with some of the more
outlandish ones and work our way up to the harder
science explanations. I like how every history mystery ranges from
right too. Oh it was mold. How you started on

(13:48):
like the most 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

(14:10):
year after 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 night, and that some sort of nuclear explosion caused
this craterless Tangusca event. Yeah, that's one of those great
uh perfect storm theories of like, of course there's no

(14:33):
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.

(14:55):
There have been a number of hoaxes where people claim
to have evidence of aliens landing 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,

(15:16):
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

(15:40):
to 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

(16:01):
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

(16:21):
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's hypothesis.
They recovered nickel, heavy silicate and magnetite samples from the
ground at the site, which backed up this whole meteorite theory.

(16:44):
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

(17:06):
a paper published Detailing and expedition to the site in
nineteen sixty one, 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 to speak of physically observed fragments from the

(17:29):
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
ninety three, authors A. A. Jackson the Fourth and MP.

(17:49):
Ryan Jr. Published a paper and the Periodical Nature, putting
forth the theory that the Tanuska 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 Brian A. Tinsley the rather

(18:12):
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, Beasley and Tensley right quote.

(18:35):
The air blast could also have resulted from the impact
of a small black hole with a diameter of the
order of Angstrom's 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 and Ryan did
point out in their own paper that the quote exit

(18:56):
proves a check on the whole hypothesis, and they suggest
us said that oceanographic and shipping records should be consulted
for anything that might suggest disturbances in the proper exit
point that would have happened in nineteen o eight. In
the late nineteen seventies, things circle back around once again
to the idea that an object from space had been
the cause of the Tunguska event, and we're going to

(19:17):
talk about some of that research right after we come
back from another little sponsor break. In November ninety l
Krazac published a paper in the Bulletin of the Astronomical
Institutes of Czechoslovakia asserting that the cause of the Tunguska
event had been a fragment of the comet Anka. Because

(19:40):
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 water and looked like any other
lake the I can question Like Checho is, according to

(20:02):
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 crater.
There are a lot of detractors to this whole theory,
pointing out that trees very near Lake Checko are mature
and old enough that they would have been flattened by
such an event, like the other trees in the area

(20:24):
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 that wasn't mapped before them. Um, yeah, that is
not a popular one. In samples from a layer of
earth from Tunguska that would have been settled there in
eight revealed microscopic rock fragments that had indeed originated in

(20:46):
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 eight and for another, there
are anybody fragments of meteorites solid for the planet, and
there's stuff from space hitting the planet literally all the time.
So even a positive I d of meteoric origin doesn't

(21:07):
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 VI Shuvalov, in a
paper published in looked at two other incidents for comparisons

(21:28):
to TUNGUSCA one was the collision of comet shoemaker Levy
nine with Jupiter, and then the February Chilly A Binsmedia
which exploded over to Chilliabinsk, Russia and blew out windows
over a two hundred square mile area. You may have
seen footage of that on YouTube. It is terrifying. So

(21:49):
their paper suggests that in the Tunguska event number one,
a meteor zipped into earth atmosphere, chugging along somewhere between
nine and ten miles per second. Number two year 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 the atmosphere. That air bursts would have been like

(22:13):
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 in Britain being
bright enough for a cricket match. It is believed that

(22:33):
that strange nighttime light phenomenon was the result of sunlight
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 of particles.
This really goes back to Kulik's early work. So this
is one of those history mysteries that continues to capture
the attention of the scientific community as they strive to

(22:53):
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
of other massive meteorites hitting the Earth, but like once,

(23:14):
we're okay, there's the 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 hundred years, so we might have
another data point soon. In the meantime, though, if you'd
like to explore the Tunguska Event. From a more fictional perspective,

(23:37):
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
I mentioned it to my husband, he brought up immediately, Oh,

(23:58):
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
shows up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer at one point,
although they get the details of it wrong, Like Willow

(24:19):
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 in nerd circles it's almost like shorthand
of like a fun kind of paranormally thing, but not
really like most people recognize the science. But if you
read the comic that told the prequel story of Transformers,

(24:42):
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
Decepticon yeah, uh yeah, and again it you'd have to
read the comic that like the supplemental material, it's not

(25:04):
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 the hugest fan of the Transformers movies. Um, but
I did see that comic because someone mentioned that it
had this event in it. The abesome listener mail for us,
I do, uh. And it is another one that is
sort of about our windsor McKay episodes, but it mentions

(25:25):
the thing I didn't mention and probably should have. Uh.
It is our listener Courtney, and Courtney writes, Hi, I
just started listening to part two of the windsor McKay
episode and had to pause to write you this note.
When I heard you mentioned little Nemo, I had a
vague but very fond memory of an animated movie from
my childhood called Little Nemo Adventures in Slumberland that was
a big non Disney favorite of my brothers and I

(25:47):
for a few years. The movie came out in nine,
but I remember watching it on repeat when I was
probably in the six to eight age range. It turns
out it was based on Windsor McKay's comic strip. Uh says,
maybe you're about to talk about it in the episode,
so I'm sorry if by being repetitive, but I was
so struck at hearing this blast from the past UH
that she wanted to go ahead and write in I

(26:09):
did not talk about it on that episode because it
is based on it, but it's not. It's made by
completely different people. I also will confess I have never
watched it, which is no shade to it. It's just
never been one of those things that hit my television screen.
But it does exist. So I'm glad she mentioned it
because that could be a point of confusion if people

(26:30):
are looking for windsor McKay things that is made by
other people that were Uh inspired by windsor McKay, including
I think Chris Columbus worked on it, which has gone
who's gone on to work on everything, including he's one
of the producers on the earliest Harry Potter movies and basically,
if you look at his IMDb page, he's touched a
lot of things you've probably watched. But yeah, that is

(26:50):
not related to windsor McKay directly, but inspired by him.
So thank you for mentioning that, Courtney, because that would
have been a good thing to mention in the episode.
If you would like to email us, you can do
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You can also find us across the spectrum of social
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com is our website address where you can come and

(27:11):
visit us and see every episode of the show that
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So come and visit us at missed in History dot
com and we can all jaunt through history together. For
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(27:32):
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