On one day in June 1908 the inhabitants of a small town in central Siberia saw a bluish-white streak of fire cut vertically across the sky to the northwest . What began as a bright point of light lengthened over a period of ten minutes until it seemed to split the sky in two . When it reached the ground it  shattered  to form a monstrous cloud of black smoke . Seconds later there was a terrific roaring detonation that made the buildings tremble . Assuming that the Day of Judgement had arrived , many of the villagers fell on their knees . The reaction was not entirely absurd ; in fact they had witnessed the greatest natural disaster in the Earth’s recorded history .

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If the object that caused what is known as “the Great Siberian Explosion” had arrived a few hours earlier or later it might have landed in more heavily populated regions , and caused millions of deaths . It could have obliterated St Petersburg , London or New York or , even if it had landed in the sea , tidal waves might have destroyed whole coastal regions . That day the human race had escaped the greatest disaster in its history and had not even been aware of it .

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   As it later turned out , the village had been over 200 miles away from the “impact point” and yet the explosion had been enough to shake debris from their roofs . A Trans-Siberian express train stopped because the driver was convinced that it was derailed , and seismographs in the town of Irkutsk indicated a crash of earthquake proportions . Both the train and the town were over 800 miles from the explosion .

   Whatever it was that struck the Tunguska region of the Siberian forestland it had exploded with a force never before imagined . Its shock-wave travelled around the globe twice before it died out , and its general effect on the weather in the northern hemisphere was far-reaching . During the rest of June it was quite possible to read the small print in the London “Times” at midnight . There were photographs of Stockholm taken at one o’clock in the morning by natural light ,and the natural day-night cycle was disturbed .

   For some months the world was treated to spectacular dawns and sunsets , as impressive as those that had been seen after the great Krakatoa eruption in the 1883 .From this , as well as the various reports of unusual cloud formations over following months , it is fair to guess deal of dust into the atmosphere . But , perhaps the strangest aspect of the Great Siberian Explosion was that one paid much attention to it . Meteorologists speculated about the strange weather , but no one came close to guessing its real cause . It was not until the Great War had been fought that Leonid Kulik stumbled upon the brief reports in ten-year-old Siberian newspaper that finally led him to suspect that something extraordinary had happened in central Siberia in the summer of 1908 .

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   Finally Kulik discovered that a local meteorologist had made an estimate of the point of impact , and later in 1927 he embarked on an expedition to the point where the meteorite had fallen .