A fireball brighter than the sun detonated miles above the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, knocking herders off their feet 40 miles away and scorching reindeer where they stood. The nearest scientists didn't reach the devastation until 1927 — and when they did, there was no impact crater to find. Asteroid? Comet? Something stranger? A century of expeditions still hasn't settled it.
A sharp two-minute primer on the largest impact event in recorded history and why it still haunts scientists. Start here, then fall in.
The full dossier: eyewitness accounts, the 2,150 square kilometers of flattened forest, seismographs triggered across Europe, and the long parade of competing theories.
A clean split between the established facts — 15 megatons, airburst 5 to 10 km up, no crater — and the stubborn unknowns: what it was, how big, and what it was made of.
The leading science explained: how a 50-to-100-meter stony body can vaporize itself in midair and still level a forest the size of a metropolis.
The Soviet meteorite hunter who hacked through Siberian swamp in 1927 to reach ground zero, found trees splayed outward from an empty center, and kept returning for an impact site that was never there.
A research team argues that nearby Lake Cheko, with its odd funnel shape, may be the missing crater — formed by a surviving chunk that punched into the permafrost. Not everyone is convinced.
Why a remote 1908 explosion drives modern planetary defense — from NASA's asteroid-tracking office to the DART mission that nudged a space rock off course in 2022.
A longer deep dive through the evidence and the fringe — comets, antimatter, even wilder ideas — and why the simplest explanation is still oddly hard to nail down.