Damage from the 1908 Tunguska impact as documented by Leonid Kulik on his 1929 expedition to the epicenter. On this day 105 years ago, Russians were reeling from the enormous fireball that streaked through the sky the day before and flattened almost 800 square miles of trees near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. It wasn't a bird. It wasn't a plane. And it sure as heck wasn't Superman. But whatever it was, scientists found no trace of it in the charred rubble. It has taken researchers over a century to identify the extraterrestrial object---but in a recent paper, geoscientists revealed that the culprit was indeed a meteoroid.
The burning chunk of rock struck Siberia on June 30, 1908 with a force 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Over a century later, it is still the largest impact event in Earth's recorded history. The area was uninhabited ...
