page_title: History of Siberia
section_title: Tunguska event
hierarchical_section_title: History of Siberia / Russian Empire / Tunguska event
caption_attribution_description: Trees were knocked down and burned over hundreds of square km by the Tunguska meteoroid impact. This image is cropped from the original, taken in May 1929 during the Leonid Kulik expedition. Русский: Ореольный бурелом вокруг места взрыва Тунгусского феномена. Все последние версии - фотография из журнала "Вокруг света" (СССР, Москва, 1931 год). Оригинальное фото сделано в мае 1929.
context_page_description: The early history of Siberia was greatly influenced by the sophisticated nomadic civilizations of the Scythians on the west of the Ural Mountains and Xiongnu on the east of the Urals, both flourishing before the Christian era. The steppes of Siberia were occupied by a succession of nomadic peoples, including the Khitan people, various Turkic peoples, and the Mongol Empire. In the late Middle Ages, Tibetan Buddhism spread into the areas south of Lake Baikal.
  During the Russian Empire, Siberia was chiefly developed as an agricultural province. The government also used it as a place of exile, sending Avvakum, Dostoevsky, and the Decemberists, among others, to work camps in the region. During the 19th century, the Trans-Siberian Railway was constructed, supporting industrialization. This was also aided by the discovery and exploitation of vast reserves of Siberian mineral resources.
context_section_description: The Tunguska Event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, at around 7:14 a.m. (0:14 UT, 7:02 a.m. local solar time) on June 30, 1908  (June 17 in the Julian calendar, in use locally at the time).
  The cause of the explosion is controversial, and still much disputed to this day. Although the cause of the explosion is the subject of debate, it is commonly believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 miles) above the Earth's surface. Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across.
  Although the Tunguska event is believed to be the largest impact event on land in Earth's recent history, impacts of similar size in remote ocean areas would have gone unnoticed before the advent of global satellite monitoring in the 1960s and 1970s. Because the event occurred in a remote area, there was little damage to human life or property, and it was in fact some years until it was properly investigated.
  The first recorded expedition arrived at the scene more than a decade after the event. In 1921, the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik, visiting the Podkamennaya Tunguska River basin as part of a survey for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, deduced from local accounts that the explosion had been caused by a giant meteorite impact. He persuaded the Soviet government to fund an expedition to the Tunguska region, based on the prospect of meteoric iron that could be salvaged to aid Soviet industry.
  Kulik's party reached the site in 1927. To their surprise, no crater was to be found. There was instead a region of scorched trees about 50 kilometres (31 mi) across. A few near ground zero were still strangely standing upright, their branches and bark stripped off. Those farther away had been knocked down in a direction away from the center.
caption: Photograph from the Soviet Academy of Science 1927 expedition led by Leonid Kulik
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