Tunguska and the Evenki
How the people who lived through the Tunguska blast understood it.
Key facts
- People and tradition
- Evenki people of central Siberia
- Region
- Asia
- When
- 1908 and after
The story
The forests around the Tunguska rivers were home to the Evenki, reindeer herders and hunters. On 30 June 1908 some of them were close enough to be knocked off their feet, to see their tents blown away and their reindeer killed.
Accounts gathered by later expeditions say that many Evenki understood the blast as the work of Agdy, a thunder spirit, sent as a punishment, perhaps called down by a shaman against a rival clan. The area of the blast came to be avoided as a forbidden place, and when the scientist Leonid Kulik arrived in 1927, he at first had difficulty persuading local people to guide him there.
What science says
The blast was an airburst: a stony asteroid or a fragment of a comet, perhaps 40 to 60 m across, exploding 5 to 10 km above the forest with an energy of several megatons of TNT. It flattened about 80 million trees. The Evenki accounts are among the most important eyewitness evidence of the event, describing the heat, the blast and the noise. Their interpretation and the scientific one describe the same terrifying morning in different ways.
Did you know?
One eyewitness, about 65 km away at the Vanavara trading post, said the heat felt as if his shirt was on fire.
The forest has largely grown back, but the radial pattern of fallen trunks could still be traced for decades.