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 th ...