Leonid Kulik
The Soviet mineralogist who led the first expeditions to the site of the 1908 Tunguska explosion.
Key facts
- Born
- 1883
- Died
- 1942
- Nationality
- Russian
- Field
- Mineralogist
Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik worked at the mineralogy museum of the Academy of Sciences in Petrograd, later Leningrad, where he became the leading Soviet meteorite researcher of his day.
In the early 1920s Kulik read old newspaper reports of a huge explosion in Siberia in June 1908, and he became convinced that a giant meteorite had fallen there. In 1927, after long efforts to gain support, he reached the remote area near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river. What he found was astonishing. Over a vast area the forest had been flattened, with trees lying in rows pointing away from a central zone, where trees still stood upright but stripped of their branches.
Kulik expected to find a large crater and a buried meteorite. He returned several times, draining swamps and drilling holes in what he thought were impact pits, but he found no crater and no meteorite. Scientists now think that an asteroid or comet fragment tens of metres across exploded several kilometres above the ground, releasing its energy as a blast wave, so that nothing large reached the surface.
Between expeditions, Kulik gathered reports of other falls across the Soviet Union and built up the Academy's collection. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he joined the people's militia at the age of 58. He was captured and died in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1942.
On the timeline
- 30 June 1908The Tunguska explosion
- 1927Kulik reaches the Tunguska site
See more
The Tunguska eventTunguska (airburst, no crater)