Tunguska - A Siberian Mystery and Its Environmental Legacy

"Imagine that you have been transported to the middle of Siberia at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. You are hiking through a bumpy, boggy forest when you come upon a spot where everything suddenly changes. Dense verdant conifers stop blocking your way. This is not because you have reached a river or a swamp, nor a meadow, a road, or a cultivated field. You do not know why the forest has ended. Curious, you climb a nearby hill to inspect. There you see rows upon rows of trees lying flat and pointing in the same direction, as if kneeling before you. They seem to go on forever. It almost looks like some massive logging operation had knocked down a city's worth of timber but then left the trees to rot away slowly. But the roots of many of these wooden victims had been torn out of the ground as well. When you trek closer, you notice standing groves with branches stripped away. Beyond these clusters of bare poles swaying in an open breeze, new rows of fallen trees shoot out: a sea of prostrate forest"--

About the author

Andy Bruno is an environmental historian and associate professor at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (2016).

Product details

• Authors: Andy Bruno, Andy (Northern Illinois University) Bruno, Bruno Andy
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.02.2025
• EAN: 9781108744393
• ISBN: 978-1-108-74439-3
• No. of pages: 324
• Series: Studies in Environment and History
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; European History, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, HISTORY / Europe / Eastern, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, History of Science