The mete­orite fell at about 7 a.m. local time in the Pod­ka­men­naya Tun­gus­ka Riv­er basin (Yeni­sei province of the Russ­ian Empire, now Kras­no­yarsk Krai).

A bright bolide was vis­i­ble across a large area of ​​East­ern Siberia, mov­ing from south­east to north­west, with a dust trail that last­ed for sev­er­al hours, end­ing with a pow­er­ful explo­sion over an unin­hab­it­ed area of ​​the taiga. The sound of the explo­sion was heard at a dis­tance of more than 1,000 km, and the blast wave was record­ed by seis­mo­graphs around the world.

The pow­er of the explo­sion is esti­mat­ed by var­i­ous researchers to be between 10 and 50 mega­tons in TNT equiv­a­lent. The blast wave destroyed for­est over an area of ​​more than 2,000 square meters.

Expe­di­tions sent to the site of the explo­sion did not find any sig­nif­i­cant amount of mete­orite mat­ter. This gave rise to many the­o­ries about what hap­pened.

Accord­ing to one ver­sion, the Tun­gus­ka mete­orite was an extreme­ly mas­sive stony mete­oroid of aster­oid ori­gin that entered the Earth­’s atmos­phere at a very flat tra­jec­to­ry and had a speed of about 20 kilo­me­ters per sec­ond. After fly­ing through the Earth­’s atmos­phere for about 1000 km, the cos­mic body was destroyed due to high pres­sure and tem­per­a­ture and explod­ed at an alti­tude of 30–40 kilo­me­ters.

Research into the Tun­gus­ka cat­a­stro­phe con­tin­ues to this day, but it has not yield­ed any con­crete results. Even the name “Tun­gus­ka mete­orite” has a for­mal mean­ing, since it is impos­si­ble to say with cer­tain­ty what celes­tial body fell in Siberia in 1908.