From Storm Dunlop
The report by Nicola Jones on yet another theory explaining the 1908 Tunguska event repeats the myth that no material has ever been recovered from the object that made the impact (7 September, p 14).
It is true that some of the material found by the mineralogist A. A. Yavnel’ in Leonid Alekseyevich Kulik’s soil samples, obtained in 1930, proved to be of terrestrial origin. However, the mineralogist O. A. Kirova recovered both magnetite globules and various forms of silicate globules from samples obtained by Kiril Pavlovich Florensky’s expedition in 1958. Such globules are characteristic of the particles produced when meteoroids enter the atmosphere, and there is no reason to doubt their origin.
These results were so significant that a further expedition in 1962 set out to determine the distribution of these particles. The investigation showed that they occur over a fairly well-defined ellipse, with high concentrations between 100 and 200 kilometres to the north-north-west of the epicentre. Florensky suggested that this distribution might be explained by fallout downwind of the high-altitude location of the final explosion.
Chichester, West Sussex
