Tunguska event
In 2017, new research by Russian scientists pointed to a rejection of the theory that Lake Cheko was created by the Tunguska event. They used soil research to determine that the lake is 280 years old or even much older; in any case clearly older than the Tunguska event. In analyzing soils from the bottom of Lake Cheko, they identified a layer of radionuclide contamination from mid-20th century nuclear testing at Novaya Zemlya. The depth of this of layer gave an average annual sedimentation rate of between 3.6 and 4.6 mm a year. These sedimentation values are less than half of the 1 cm/year calculated by Gasperini "et al." in their 2009 publication on their analysis of the core they took from Lake Cheko in 1999. The Russian scientists in 2017, counted at least 280 such annual varves in the 1260 mm long core sample pulled from the bottom of the lake, representing an age of the lake that would be older than the Tunguska Event.