In June of 1908, a blast of approximately 15 megatons (roughly 1,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb) rocketed the desolate Tunguska River Valley in central Siberia. The explosion felled 80 million trees and sent so much dust into the stratosphere that Europeans as distant as Paris reported that the night sky was so aglow you could read by its light. Despite pseudo-scientific conjecture - aliens! doomsday! a black hole tunneling through Earth! Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower gone awry! - the consensus now is that the blast was caused by a meteoric air burst, the largest meteor strike in the last 10,000 years. The study has also identified the meteor, which passed around June 27, 1908, and will be passing close to Earth again in 2045.