This Day in Science Fiction History: 30 June

Historical Entry—Tuesday, June 30, 1908

Photograph of the blast crater and trees knocked over by the overpressure wave (1931 Leonid Kulik)

The year is 1908. The Great War is six years in the future. The Bolshevik Revolution is nine years in the future. Tsar Nicholas II, who history will declare the last of the Romanov dynasty to rule, sits on the throne in Imperial Russia. And in a remote, desolate, and mostly uninhabited section of Siberia, at about 7:15 am local, the early morning quiet is shattered. The largest asteroid impact in recorded human history had just occurred.

A great fireball streaked through the sky, followed by a flash brighter than the sun. Next, a loud noise like thunder crashed through the air. People more than 20 miles away reported being thrown into the air and getting knocked unconscious. Further away, people reported seeing a large column of smoke and dust rising high into the sky. Seismic instruments, hundreds of miles away, recorded the tremors from the impact’s shock waves.

An asteroid, or more properly a bolide since it had entered the Earth’s atmosphere, had exploded over the taiga. Later analysis of the area determined the bolide was approximately 130 feet in diameter (about 7/8 the height of the Marriott Downtown Chattanooga), entered the atmosphere at an angle of 30°, and exploded at about six miles of altitude. The explosion released an estimated 15 megatons of force. The explosion would have been almost a thousand times larger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

Local Evenki people, reindeer herders who lived a nomadic lifestyle, were the only direct witnesses. They wouldn’t be asked about the event until geologist Leonid A. Kulick finally was able to reach the impact zone in 1927. He described the area as a butterfly-shaped area of destruction of 830 square miles with an estimated 80 million trees knocked over. Leonid would lead three more expeditions to the area for study, with the last in 1938 which included an aerial photographic survey.

Tunguska Asteroid Impact

Historical Event

1908

This Day in Science Fiction History examines notable events, real and fictional, concerning fantasy and science fiction in various media.