Trees knocked over by the Tunguska blast. Photograph from Leonid Kulik's 1920 expedition.
The Tunguska Event was a powerful explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia, on the morning of June 30, 1908. The explosion was caused by a meteor air burst, at an altitude of 510 kilometers (36 miles) above Earth's surface, that flattened an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers (830 square miles).
In the alternate-history of Resistance, the Tunguska Event was caused by an object carrying the Chimera back to Earth after having left over 60 million years ago.
History[]
The Chimera, for reasons that remains unknown, returned to Earth in 1908 in the form of a virus-infused meteor.[1][2] The meteor impacted in Siberia on June 30 and its explosion was registered across Eurasia.[3][4]
There was little scientific curiosity about the impact at the time, in part due to the isolation of the Tunguska region and significant social and political upheaval affecting Russia. It was not until in August 1920 that a scientific expedition led by Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik was dispatched to investigate the site of the impact.[4][5] The expedition interviewed the native Evenki people who witnessed the event, whom they believed that an angry god, Agdy, had entered the atmosphere and caused the phenomena.[5] Twenty days later, the expedition went missing after communication with the Russian Academy of Sciences ceased.[4][5] Despite an intensive search, the search parties were unsuccessful in locating Kulik's expedition. On November 9, due to the approaching harsh Siberian winter, the Russian authorities called off the search and declared the expedition presumed lost to an early winter.[4][5]
Twenty-three years after the Tunguska Event, many of the local Siberian tribes developed legends of warfare on an epic scale, with entire villages and herds of animals wiped out, leaving only disease and death. One such legend even told of a local shaman suddenly transforming into a six-eyed eight-foot-tall monster, impervious to bullets and knives, and running off into the icy wastes.[6] These accounts are the first early reports of the Chimera.
Gallery[]
References[]
- ^ Tunguska
- ^ Desperation
- ^ Timeline retrieved from the official Resistance website.
- ^ a b c d Official Resistance Series Timeline on Gameinformer.com
- ^ a b c d SRPA file AN952795LOG1
- ^ SRPA file AN952795LOG2
External link[]
- Tunguska Event on Wikipedia.