On June 30, 1908, a blast a thousand times stronger than Hiroshima flattened 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest — yet left no crater and no fragments. More than a century later, scientists still argue over what actually detonated in the sky over Tunguska.
A tour of the morning the sky exploded over the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, and why nomadic reindeer herders were thrown from their tents 40 miles away.
The comprehensive record: eyewitness accounts, the butterfly-shaped blast pattern, and the decades of expeditions that never found the crater everyone expected.
NASA lays out the physics of an airburst — how a stony object can vaporize itself 5 to 10 km up and still level a forest the size of a metropolis.
Why it took 19 years for the first scientist to even reach the site, and what Leonid Kulik found when he finally stood in the middle of it.
A deeper dive into the competing theories — from icy comet to iron asteroid to the fringe ideas that refuse to die.
A concise authoritative summary of the 15-megaton blast and the enduring comet-versus-asteroid debate at its heart.
A 2020 model argues a 650-foot asteroid skimmed the atmosphere and flew back into space — which would neatly explain the missing crater and missing rock.