Deep in the Siberian forest is the record of an explosion that is a thousand times larger than Hiroshima. It was a summer morning in the Tunguska River Basin, a man was sitting on his porch enjoying the sunlight on his face. When suddenly he was a blown backwards out of his chair and he felt as if his whole body was on fire. He was 40 miles away from the center of this explosion. Windows shattered for hundreds of miles around. Shockwaves rippled across Europe. The night sky was illuminated for weeks after and people were able to read their newspapers in the middle of the night from London to Asia. It was 20 years before a scientist was actually able to make it out to the site of this disaster. Leonid Kulik, the chief curator of meteorite collection at the St. Peter's Brent Museum, made a journey out in 1927. It was an arduous trip. It took forever to get to this remote area in the Siberian wilderness and what he found shocked him. He found 83 million trees felled in a circular radius covering over 600 miles. At the center of this, the trees stood straight up, burned to a crisp and stripped of their bark and their branches. Locals were at first really reluctant to talk to him. They thought that this explosion had been the work of Agdi, a god who had come down to punish them by destroying their land and their livestock. So a hundred years later, there are still questions about exactly what happened at the Tegasca event. A space object, maybe a comet, but probably a meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere. This thing was 200 feet wide and probably weighed over 220 million pounds. And it came into the atmosphere at around 33,000 miles per hour. As it sped towards the Earth's surface, it encountered the pushback, the friction of the atmosphere, which heated it to over 45,000 degrees. And it was at this moment that it exploded. It sent out a shockwave in a butterfly pattern. Imagine an explosion so powerful that it could explode miles above the Earth's surface and still measure as a 5.0 on the Richter scale. Had it happened over a city, it easily could have leveled an area on the size of Tokyo. And here's the thing. Well, it was relatively rare. Astronomers have done the math and they think an event like this happens roughly every 300 years. So, depending on probability, we've got another Tegasca event in our near future. Done, done, done. Subscribe here and watch more videos here. There should be little explosions happening. Little explosions didn't happen. Something went wrong. The debate still goes on about whether it was a meteorite or a comet. There are good arguments for both. Some Italian scientists believe that they have, in fact, found the impact crater. Checko Lake. Of course, the locals are like, you know, that lake's definitely been here forever. So, it's a little, it's a little bit hard to say. There is a weird theory that it is a kind of gas vent that was releasing an enormous amount of methane, I guess. We're created kind of a huge pool of gas in the sky going down to the vent and then it was struck by lightning and it was like a wick down to this gas crater and it exploded in this enormous insane way. But it's a lot more likely that it was just a meteorite.