110 Years After The Tunguska Event We Still Aren't Sure What Caused It

At 7:15 on the morning of June 30, 1908, something happened in the sky above the Stony Tunguska (Podkamennaya Tunguska) river in Siberia. Many thousand people in a radius of 900 miles observed the Tunguska event and more than 700 accounts were collected later. The reports describe a fireball in the sky, larger or similar to the size of the sun, a series of explosions “with a frightful sound”, followed by shaking of the ground as “the earth seemed to get opened wide and everything would fall in the abyss. Terrible strokes were heard from somewhere, which shook the air [].” The indigenous Evenks and Yakuts believed a god or shaman had sent the fireball to destroy the world. Various meteorological stations in Europe recorded both seismic and atmospheric waves. Days later strange phenomena were observed in the sky of Russia and Europe, such as glowing clouds, colorful sunsets and a strange luminescence in the night.

A devastating explosion occurred in a remote swampy area of Siberia in June 1908 that even now continues to spark controversy and theories of widely varying plausibility.