This day in history: The Tunguska event happened on this day in 1908. The Tunguska event (occasionally also called the Tunguska incident) was a ~12 megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of June 30, 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 830 sq miles of forest, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event. The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony meteoroid about 160–200 feet in size. The meteoroid approached from the east-southeast, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 60,000 mph. It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 3 to 6 miles rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth.
The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, though much larger impacts have occurred in prehistoric times. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area. It has been mentioned numerous times in popular culture, and has also inspired real-world discussion of asteroid impact avoidance.
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