BBC:

On 30 June 1908, an explosion ripped through the air above a remote forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river.

The fireball is believed to have been 50-100m wide. It depleted 2,000 sq km of the taiga forest in the area, flattening about 80 million trees.

This “Tunguska event” remains the most powerful of its kind recorded in history – it produced about 185 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb (with some estimates coming in even higher). Seismic rumbles were even observed as far away as the UK.

And yet, over a hundred years later researchers are still asking questions about what exactly took place on that fateful day.

As a kid in Nova Scotia, I was fascinated by these explosions. I started off devouring information at the Halifax Public Library about the Halifax Explosion, moved on to Krakatoa and to the “Tunguska event”. No idea why these explosions fascinated me but I still read articles about them 40 years later.