Tunguska event, Tunguska Nature Reserve

The Tunguska event was a ~12 megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia, on the morning of June 30, 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km² of forest, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event. The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony meteoroid about 50–60 metres in size. The meteoroid approached from the east-southeast, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s. It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth. ()