Leonid Kulik

Leonid Kulik (1883–1942) was a Russian and Soviet mineralogist who specialized in meteorites. Working for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, he became interested in reports of a great fall in central Siberia in June 1908.

In 1927 he led the first scientific expedition to the remote Podkamennaya Tunguska region. He found a huge area of flattened forest, with trees lying radially outward from a center where some still stood upright but stripped of branches. He expected a crater and meteorite fragments but found neither. He returned on several further expeditions through the 1930s and arranged aerial photography of the area.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Kulik volunteered for the militia, was captured in 1941, and died of typhus in a prison camp in 1942. Most scientists now think the 1908 event was the airburst of a stony asteroid or comet fragment, which explains the missing crater.