P
hotographs taken during the first expeditions of
Leonid Kulik, showing glimpses of the devastation of
the Siberian taiga, produced by the Tunguska event. The
few trees left standing were called “telegraph poles.”To fully evaluate the new reports, however, it is nec-
essary to go back over what happened in Central
Siberia in the now-distant June 30 , 1908. At 7 : 15
local time, in the sky above a plateau bathed by the
river Podkamennaya Tunguska, in an almost inac-
cessible and uninhabited territory, a fireball ap-
pears that some witnesses described as red, bigger
and brighter than the Sun, and accompanied by a
trail of dust, thunder, and a terrifying final explo-
sion. Houses trembled even at great distances from
the explosion site, a pressure wave went around the
Earth twice and, in the following nights, an extraor-
dinary brightness of the sky was noticed both in all
of Russia and in northern Europe. In England, in the
night between June 30 and July 1 st, the sky did not
become dark, and in London you could read the
newspaper at midnight. In Glasgow, Scotland, the
night sky was so bright that only first and second
magnitude stars were visible. Microbarographs of
the Royal Meteorological Society recorded sharpTunguska 111 EN_l'Astrofilo 29/08/2019 15:43 Page 26