Why The Largest Asteroid Impact In Recorded History Still Puzzles Scientists

When Kulik arrived, he found trees flattened out radially as far as 20 miles from the blast’s epicenter (via Britannica), which was so scorched that even nineteen years later, very little foliage or trees had begun to regrow. Yet, he never found an impact crater or any fragments indicating what caused the explosion.

The concussive force of the explosion created a magnitude 4.5 to 5 earthquake. According to NASA, shockwaves were recorded more than 3,100 miles away in London, and the blast was heard 700 miles away. Thousands of reindeer perished, but very few people died. Calculations suggest the vast volumes of gas expelled into the atmosphere when the object vaporized caused the night skies in Asia, Paris, and London to remain illuminated for days (via WNYC Radio).

While thousands likely observed something that morning, it took decades to record any eyewitness accounts officially. Most of them had since turned into second-hand retellings from original eyewitnesses. Many focused on the fireball streaking across the sky, the ground shaking, and the hot winds strong enough to knock people down and shake buildings (via Britannica).

But in 2008, new facts emerged from previously unknown first-hand accounts. In 1948 Russian ethnographer and historian Sev’yan Vainshtein went to the Sulomay region to study the local people known as the Ket. According to Forbes, Sulomay lies 358 miles west of where the Tunguska event occurred and is considered the farthest point from the epicenter where trees were knocked down.

Most of the information Vainshtein gathered aligned with what was already known… except for one relatively major detail. Until then, people thought the bright lights observed around the globe happened the night after the explosion, but according to the Ket, that event actually occurred the night before (via Forbes).