The
Tunguska event was a large explosion that occurred near the Tunguska River, in where is now Russia. The explosion occurred at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 mi) by a stony asteroid that is believed to have burst in the air rather than hitting the surface.
Since the 1908 explosion, there have been an estimated 1,000 scholarly papers (mainly in Russian) published on the Tunguska explosion. In 2013, a team of researchers led by Victor Kvasnytsya of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine published analysis results of micro-samples from a peat bog near the blast epicenter showing fragments that may be of meteoric origin.
Estimates of the energy of the blast range from as low as three to as high as 30 megatons of TNT. The energy of the explosion was about 1,000 times greater than that of the
atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; roughly equal to that of the United States' Castle Bravo ground-based thermonuclear test detonation on March 1, 1954; and about two-fifths that of the Soviet Union's later Tsar Bomba (the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated).
It is estimated that the Tunguska explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 square kilometers (830 sq mi), and that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the
Richter scale, affecting countries as far as the UK. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area, but due to the remoteness of the location no fatalities were documented.
