On June 30, 1908, at 7.14 a.m. local time (12.14 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time), an explosion occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in East Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk Territory, not far from the Vanavara trading post, now Vanavara town, the administrative center of the Evenki Autonomous Area’s Tungussko-Chunsky District.
Pictures such as this, taken by the Leonid Kulik expedition in 1930,
show the directional fall of trees over a wide area.
The meteorite could have killed millions of people if it had exploded over a densely populated area.
A place in the taiga near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River where the Tunguska Meteorite fell on June 30, 1908. Scientists working in different fields are still trying to solve the mystery of the Tunguska explosion. An expedition studying the Tunguska event has a laboratory here, on the shore of a taiga lake.
Diamond-graphite formations from the site of the Tunguska event on the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in the Krasnoyarsk Territory.
Alexei Zolotov, a well-known authority on the Tunguska event and department chief at the Oktyabrsky subsidiary of the All-Union Geophysical Prospecting Methods Institute.
Soviet scientist Alexei Zolotov, left, scooping up earth samples in the vicinity of the Tunguska event.