Disputes about what the Tunguska meteorite was, which swept the Siberian taiga more than 100 years ago, is still ongoing. The most fantastic versions are put forward. But the name of Leonid Kulik, who actually opened this event to the world, is remembered by very few.
On the morning of June 30, 1908, the inhabitants of the Evenk village of Vanavara saw an unusual phenomenon. A huge red-orange ball was moving high in the sky. A few minutes later, there was a deafening explosion, from which everyone fell to the ground, and the ball disappeared behind the tops of the pines. The explosion of monstrous force was recorded even by a seismic station in Germany.
Taiga in the area of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite is still full of bald spots
Miracle over the taiga
The fall of the Tunguska meteorite is recognized by scientists as a global event of the 20th century. However, it could happen that neither science nor society could ever learn about him. At the same time, the power of the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite was equal to the power of the largest tested hydrogen bomb (50 megatons in TNT equivalent).
Hold the "alien" for 4-5 hours. The earth would turn to him with the part where Vyborg is located. After that, only stones would remain from the ancient city, and the capital of the Russian Empire - St. Petersburg - would experience significant destruction.
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It's hard to believe, but for several years no one knew about the grand event, except for several dozen illiterate people. Only two weeks after the fall, a note appeared in the provincial newspaper Sibirskaya Zhizn:
“At about 8 o'clock in the morning, a few fathoms from the railroad track, near the Filimonovo junction, not reaching 11 versts to Kansk, according to the stories, a huge meteorite fell … The passengers of the train approaching the meteorite during the fall were struck by an extraordinary roar; the train was stopped by the driver, and the audience rushed to the place where the distant wanderer fell. But she did not manage to examine the meteorite closer, as it was red-hot …"
Of course, a good half of the article was a journalist's invention. But 13 years later, she caught the eye of Leonid Kulik, an employee of the Meteorite Department of the Petrograd Mineralogical Museum. The scientist decided to check the information.
38-year-old Leonid Kulik was not a novice in science, although at that time he did not even have a higher education.
After graduating from the Trinity Gymnasium with a gold medal in 1903, the son of a zemstvo doctor Leonid Kulik entered the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute. But a year later he was expelled for participating in the unrest.
Kulik did not give up - while teaching workers in Sunday school, he entered the regimental school at the same time (he was subject to an early draft) and became a volunteer at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Kazan University.
However, in Kazan, Leonid took part in an armed uprising, after the defeat of which he fled to Tiraspol, and then to his native Troitsk. Here Kulik was simultaneously elected chairman of the RSDLP (b) cell and secretary of the society of clerks.
The reforms of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin led to the fact that the protest movement in Russia began to decline. Kulik got a job as an assistant forester, got married, and had a daughter. In 1911, in order to search for radioactive minerals, an expedition of Vladimir Vernadsky arrived in the Urals. Academician in ka-
As a surveyor, he hired a local forester Kulik. The young man made a positive impression on the scientist, and upon returning to St. Petersburg, he invited Kulik to the post of an employee of the Mineralogical Museum of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Science is more important than politics
The First World War did not allow Kulik to devote himself entirely to science. As a reserve warrant officer, he was subject to conscription in the first place and ended up in the dragoon regiment. Kulik fought bravely, for which he was sent by his superiors to the Petrograd military school, from where two months later he came out with the shoulder straps of a cornet.
Soon, for military successes, he was promoted to lieutenant. In 1917, Kulik was awarded the Order of St. Stanislav 3rd degree and St. Anna 3rd degree.
Even in war, the officer's inquisitive mind found time for science. Not far from the camp of his regiment, on the coast of the Gulf of Riga, he discovered an amber deposit, which he began to study. Later, on the instructions of the Military-Technical Assistance Committee, together with A. E. Fersman and V. I. Kryzhanovsky studied fluorite deposits in the Tver province along the Vazuz and Osuge rivers. For these services, Kulik was transferred to the Central Scientific and Technical Laboratory in Petrograd in 1917.
But now the revolution prevented him from doing science.
It was impossible for an experienced Bolshevik to stay away from the revolutionary maelstrom. However, science for him at that time became more important than politics. In 1919, Kulik left for Tomsk, where he took up the position of assistant at one of the departments of the physics and mathematics faculty of the local university.
The Whites who entered the city handed Lieutenant Kulik to court for evading military service. Taking into account the fact that the defendant "expressed a desire" to continue the service, there was no punishment as such.
But when the Whites retreated from Tomsk, Kulik fled to join the ranks of the Red Army. However, even there Leonid tried to distance himself from hostilities, believing that science is above all. Having received a teaching position at the Department of Mineralogy of Tomsk University, in the summer of 1920, Kulik, as part of Professor Kurbatov's expedition, went to the taiga.
The end of the Civil War allowed Leonid to return to Petrograd, where his idea to study meteorites was supported by Professor Vernadsky. The lack of higher education prevented Kulik from becoming the head of the Meteorite Department. But he was the main engine of this direction, collecting information on all meteorites that fell on the territory of the USSR.
In August 1921, Kulik organized an expedition to check information about the meteorites that fell in 1918 near Saratov.
The scientist managed to find 233 meteorite fragments, which were carefully studied. From here the expedition went to Siberia, where Kulik saw a note in the "Siberian Life" about the fall in 1908 of an unknown celestial body. However, it was not possible to immediately go in search of the meteorite.
In 1924, at the request of Kulik, the geologist Sergei Obruchev (the son of the famous traveler and writer) who was in those places visited the village of Vanavara. The Evenks spoke in detail about the outbreaks and explosion, as well as about the fact that about 100 kilometers from the village, on a huge area, trees were uprooted.
Disappeared without a trace
Obruchev's message spurred Kulik's scientific interest, and in 1927 he organized the first expedition to the banks of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. Upon arrival at the site, the researcher was struck by a grandiose felling of the forest, made around a circle with a radius of tens of kilometers.
But he was even more shocked that at the epicenter of the alleged explosion, the trees were not turned out, but only lost bark and branches, resembling telegraph poles. In the middle of the “pillar” section, Kulik found a lake that looked like a trail from a meteorite fall.
Diamond-graphite aggregates from the site of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite on the Podkamennaya Tunguska river near the village of Vanavara in the Krasnoyarsk Territory.
A year later, Kulik returned with a new detachment. The expedition carried out a topographic survey, dug a series of craters and partially pumped out water from the lake. But not a single fragment of the meteorite was found. A year later, Leonid Alekseevich returned here with powerful pumps for draining swamps and drilling equipment.
Having opened the largest crater, scientists found a stump at its bottom, which was older than 1908. And other craters turned out to be ordinary sinkholes caused by the thawing of permafrost in the depths of the soil.
Kulik was not going to give up. In the area of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite, he organized three more expeditions. But he did not manage to hold a piece of alien ore in his hands.
Already in the 1990s, the scientific world agreed with the hypothesis that the Tunguska meteorite mainly consisted of ice. Exploded at an altitude of 5-7 kilometers, it turned into water, steam and fine dust. Kulik could not know all this and hoped for good luck until the very end. The scientist planned his last expedition for the summer of 1941, but the war prevented …
The 58-year-old scientist was not subject to conscription, but volunteered to join the people's militia. In September 1941, the Red Army soldier Kulik took the first battle, and a month later his unit was surrounded near the town of Spas-Demensky in the Kaluga region and taken prisoner. Leonid Alekseevich worked as an orderly in a hospital organized by the prisoners themselves.
As a result, he contracted typhus from a patient and on April 14, 1942, died suddenly. The researcher was buried by a local resident by the name of Goltsov, who not only looked after the grave, but also preserved the scientist's archive.
Prokhor EZHOV
