Siberia

The Chuchunya: Siberia’s Wild Man of the Frozen Taiga

by
Snow-covered taiga and distant hills in Yakutia, Siberia — the frozen forest and tundra where the chuchunya is said to live

About 6 min readIn the frozen taiga of Yakutia, the Yakut people tell of a tall, hair-covered wild man who wears animal skins, outruns reindeer, and watches hunters from the tree line. Russian explorers recorded him in the 1840s, Soviet ethnographers collected dozens of accounts, and no one has ever explained him away.

The Tunguska Event: The Explosion That Flattened 80 Million Trees — and Left No Crater

by
Trees flattened by the Tunguska explosion, photographed during the 1927 Kulik expedition

About 4 min readOn 30 June 1908, something exploded in the sky over central Siberia, flattening 2,150 square kilometres of forest and registering on seismographs across Eurasia. No crater was ever found. No fragment of the object was ever recovered. More than a century later, the Tunguska event is still the largest impact in recorded history — and still partly unexplained.