Case file · Cosmic event
Kulik reaches the Tunguska blast zone
Mineralogist Leonid Kulik led the first scientific expedition to the Tunguska site and found trees flattened radially for kilometres around a standing 'telegraph-pole' forest.
1927 CE · 60.89, 101.89 · status: official
The account
Kulik expected a huge meteorite crater and spent the following years draining swamps in search of iron. He found none. His photographs of the radial treefall remain the classic images of the event; he died a prisoner of war in 1942.
The sceptical view
The absence of a crater is now explained by an airburst several kilometres up, not by anything exotic.
Connections in the atlas
- Ogdy, the fire god, punishes the Evenki
- Tunguska event