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A violent explosion that took place over the valley of the Stony Tunguska river, in central Siberia, at 7.17 a.m. local time (0h 17m 11s U.T.), on June 30, 1908, with the epicenter at 0؛55' N, 101؛57' E [13]. This location is in the central Siberian area of Russia, about 1,000 km north of the town of Irkutsk and Lake Baikal.

The event is now widely attributed in the astronomical community to the detonation of icy material from a comet in the Earth's atmosphere. The blast, which stripped or felled trees out to a radius of 40 km, burned reindeer to death, and sent the tents of nomads flying through the air, was preceded by the observed passage across the sky of a dazzling blue bolide, said to be almost as bright as the Sun, trailing a column of dust.

The explosion registered at seismic stations across Eurasia, and produced fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected by the recently invented barographs in Britain. Over the next few weeks, night skies over Europe and western Russia glowed brightly enough for people to read by. In the United States, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory observed a decrease in atmospheric transparency that lasted for several months. The size of the blast was later estimated to be between 10 and 15 megatons.

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