Episode Notes:
On the morning of June 30th, 1908, something traveling at sixty thousand miles per hour entered the atmosphere above central Siberia and exploded with the force of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. Eighty million trees were flattened across two thousand square kilometers of forest. The shockwave circled the globe twice. For several nights afterward, the skies over London glowed bright enough to read a newspaper by at midnight. The thing that caused all of it left no crater, no wreckage, and almost nothing recoverable. It simply vanished.
Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the indigenous Evenki people who felt the heat and were thrown from their feet and named it after their god of thunder, the Russian scientist who spent years fighting for an expedition to reach the site, and the century of investigation that followed — from alien spacecraft theories to the quiet, definitive work of dendrochronology and microparticle analysis. The Tunguska event is not a mystery anymore. But what it means for the planet we live on is a question worth sitting with very carefully.
Strange Epochs tells true stories from history’s stranger corners. Each episode is written for deep listening — slow, atmospheric, and immersive. Whether you’re behind the wheel, unwinding after a long day, or settling in for sleep, this show is built to pull you in and carry you somewhere else.
Sources are listed in the show notes:
- Wikipedia contributors. Tunguska event. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
- NASA History. One hundred and fifteen years ago: The Tunguska Asteroid Impact Event. 2023.
- Britannica editors. Tunguska event. Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated 2024.
- Planetary Science Institute. The 1908 Siberia Explosion: Reconstructing an Asteroid Impact from Eyewitness Accounts. 2023.
- Royal Observatory Greenwich. The Tunguska Event Explained. 2023.
- Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. The 1908 Tunguska Event and the Threats of Tomorrow. Ohio State University, 2018.
- Vasiliev, N.V., Kovalevsky, A.F., Razin, S.A., Epiktetova, L.E. Eyewitness Accounts of Tunguska. 1981.
- Kulik, Leonid. Reports on the Tunguska expeditions, 1927 to 1939. Soviet Academy of Sciences.