On a clear summer morning in 1908, a bright light was seen in the sky over the Siberian forest around the Tunguska River. Minutes later, a shock wave flattened 800 square miles of forest, killed hundreds of thousands of animals, and blew out windows some 200 miles away from the impact site. But when scientists went looking for the crater, they found no evidence that anything at all had hit the ground. On this episode, we’re discussing meteors / comets / asteroids / meteoroids, space grazers, a lake with a weird shape, and what exactly lay at ground zero of the Tunguska Event.

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Sources for this episode include: 

“The Tunguska Event: The Mystery of the Biggest Explosion in Recorded History” by Charles River Editors, 2014

"The Mystery of the Dark Asteroid That Scorched Russia" by M. Altamirano for Nautilus, 2020

"Tunguska Revisited: 111-Year-Old Mystery Impact Inspires New, More Optimistic Asteroid Predictions" by K. E. Smith for NASA.gov, 2019

"The Tunguska explosion, 114 years ago today", by P. S. Anderson and K. K. Witt for Earth Sky, 2022

"Preliminary Results from the 1961 Combined Tunguska Meteorite Expedition" by K.P. Florenskiy for Meteoritica, 1963 

"The Tunguska Mystery" by L. Gasperini, E. Bonatti,and G. Longo for Scientific American, 2008