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Did desperate fishermen cannibalise their friends in extreme cold in remote Siberia? In the most extreme conditions, the unimaginable can happen. Police in Siberia are now trying to piece together a mystery that unfolded after four friends went on a fishing expedition in August in the endless taiga. Three months later, only two men came back from their adventure along the remote Sutam River, after they were located in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) by a rescue helicopter from the Russian Emergencies Ministry, which saved their lives. Alexander Abdullaev, 37, and Alexei Gradulenko, 35, were found alive - but only just....

'Yeti' Sightings On The Rise In Russia A group of yetis are on the loose in Sibera, fishermen and a forestry worker have claimed. There were three reported sightings in recent weeks. One person who reported spying the beast said “We shouted, ‘Do you need help?’ They rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making their way through the bushes and with two other limbs, straight up the hill. The person who made the report added: “It could not be bears, as the bear walks on all fours, and they ran on two. Then they were gone.” On...

It sounds like a mash-up of Indiana Jones' plots, but German researchers say a heavy Buddha statue brought to Europe by the Nazis was carved from a meteorite that likely fell 10,000 years ago along the Siberia-Mongolia border.

The ancient mummy of a mysterious young woman, known as the Ukok Princess, is finally returning home to the Altai Republic this month. She is to be kept in a special mausoleum at the Republican National Museum in capital Gorno-Altaisk, where eventually she will be displayed in a glass sarcophagus to tourists. For the past 19 years, since her discovery, she was kept mainly at a scientific institute in Novosibirsk, apart from a period in Moscow when her remains were treated by the same scientists who preserve the body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin. To mark the move 'home', The...

What Caused Argentina's Mystery Craters? By Ben Harder for National Geographic News May 9, 2002 For more than a decade, planetary scientists have been puzzling over a mixed bag of meteorite evidence scarring Argentina's plains. They gradually pieced together clues to reconstruct what seemed to be a rough-hewn but generally accurate account of a prehistoric meteorite impact. A mere 10,000 years ago, scientists deduced in the original theory, a sizable meteorite came hurtling through the atmosphere at a bizarrely low angle, smacked the ground with a glancing blow, and broke into numerous pieces that gouged separate, miles-long scars in the...

The most dramatic cosmic impact in recent history has gathered up almost as many weird explanations as it knocked down trees, writes Duncan Steel. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers — a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. So begins Rendezvous with Rama , a 1972 novel by Arthur C. Clarke in which mankind learns the hard way about the dangers posed by incoming asteroids. The 2077 impact in northern Italy that Clarke goes on to describe is fictional: the 1908...

It's bad enough when, every few million years, an asteroid rocks our planet. It's worse if the impact triggers regional or global volcanic activity, which is not only hazardous to nearby plants and animals but can choke Earth's atmosphere with deadly gases for months or years. But there's also a possible bright side, like the birth of nice places like Hawaii. For more than three decades, scientists have explored the question of whether an asteroid impact could cause significant volcanic eruptions, hot spots that spring up out of nowhere and create new landforms or rearrange old ones. The process might...

Astronomers may have solved the puzzle of what it was that brought so much devastation to a remote region of Siberia almost a century ago. The asteroid was probably a pile of space rubble - like Mathilde In the early morning of 30 June, 1908, witnesses told of a gigantic explosion and blinding flash. Thousands of square kilometres of trees were burned and flattened. Scientists have always suspected that an incoming comet or asteroid lay behind the event - but no impact crater was ever discovered and no expedition to the area has ever found any large fragments of an ...

Tuesday, 8 October, 2002, 11:05 GMT 12:05 UK Cash plea for Russian meteor chasers The impact happened in Siberia on Thursday By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Scientists investigating what is believed to be a "significant" fresh meteor crater in a remote part of Siberia are begging for funds to mount an expedition. A British meteorite expert has called on the international scientific community to help Russian scientists get to the impact site, which may be of major scientific importance. It is imperative that US and UK funding bodies to support our Russian colleagues in their investigation...

Russian scientists in bid to solve Tunguska Event Last Updated: 1:18AM BST 02/07/2008 Russian scientists will this week attempt to solve the mystery of a giant explosion 100 years ago that turned night to day across western Europe and flattened a large swathe of Siberia. Trees lay strewn across the Siberian countryside, in 1953, 45 years after an 'unexplained explosion' near Tunguska, Russia A century after reindeer herdsmen saw a column of light that shone with the intensity of the Sun moving across the Siberian dawn sky, the Tunguska Event remains one of the modern era's most abiding scientific riddles....

Asteroid 'hit northern Russia' A large meteorite is thought to have smashed into a forest in a remote area of Russia. Residents in the town of Bodaibo, in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, saw a large luminous body fall from the sky. They say the impact caused the ground to shake and made a sound like thunder. Flashes of bright light could be seen above the impact site, which was a long way from any settlements according to the Russian newspaper Pravda. "Locals felt a strong shock, which could be comparable to an earthquake," said the report. "In addition to...

Smaller asteroids may pose greater danger than previously believed INCINERATION POSSIBLE - Fine points of the "fireball" that might be expected from an asteroid exploding in Earth's atmosphere are indicated in a supercomputer simulation devised by a team led by Sandia researcher Mark Boslough. (Photo by Randy Montoya ) Download 300dpi JPEG image (Media are welcome to download/publish this image with related news stories.)ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations...

At 7.17am on June 30, 1908, an explosion like a hydrogen bomb erupted in Siberia - and until now, scientists have offered no conclusive explanation for the event.The Tunguska event occurred near the Tunguska River in SiberiaItalian scientists claim to have found chunks of a meteorite in nearby Lake Cheko Seismic reflection and magnetic data revealed an anomaly close to the lake center, about 30ft below the lake floor compatible with the presence of a buried stony object and supports the impact crater origin for Lake Cheko.' 'The sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the...

On 30 June 1908, in the remote Tunguska forest of Siberia, a vast explosion charred and flattened trees across an area nearly as large as Rhode Island. Scientists have long been mystified as to the cause, although prevailing wisdom has it that it was an extraterrestrial chunk of ice or rock (Science, 20 August 1999, p. 1205). Tunguska epicenter today. CREDIT: VITALII ROMEIKO But two scientists last week rejected the "E.T. hypothesis" at a conference on environmental catastrophes in London. Andrei Ol'khovatov, formerly of the Soviet Radio Instrument Industry Research Institute, noted that no one has ever found definitive traces...

The so-called ‘Tunguska Event’ refers to a major explosion that occurred on 30 June 1908 in the Tunguska region of Siberia, causing the destruction of over 2000 km2 of taiga, globally detected pressure and seismic waves, and bright luminescence in the night skies of Europe and Central Asia, combined with other unusual phenomena. The ‘Tunguska Event’ may be related to the impact with the Earth of a cosmic body that exploded about 5–10 km above ground, releasing in the atmosphere 10–15 Mton of energy. Fragments of the impacting body have never been found, and its nature (comet or asteroid) is...

In late June of 1908, a fireball exploded above the remote Russian forests of Tunguska, Siberia, flattening more than 800 square miles of trees. Researchers think a meteor was responsible for the devastation, but neither its fragments nor any impact craters have been discovered. Astronomers have been left to guess whether the object was an asteroid or a comet, and figuring out what it was would allow better modeling of potential future calamities. Italian researchers now think they've found a smoking gun: The 164-foot-deep Lake Cheko, located just 5 miles northwest of the epicenter of destruction. "When we looked at...

In the Russian Arctic lies buried an unfinished railway built by prisoners of Stalin's gulags. For decades, no-one talked about it. But one woman is now telling the story of the thousands who suffered there—and there is talk of bringing back to life the abandoned railway itself. … Lyudmila (Lipatova) and I had uncovered a tiny section of one of Joseph Stalin's cruelest and most ambitious projects—the Trans-Polar Main Line. It was (Stalin's) attempt to conquer the Arctic—part of what he called his Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. The scheme was supposed to link the eastern and western...

A juvenile mammoth, nicknamed "Yuka," was found entombed in Siberian ice near the shores of the Arctic Ocean and shows signs of being cut open by ancient people. The remarkably well preserved frozen carcass was discovered in Siberia as part of a BBC/Discovery Channel-funded expedition and is believed to be at least 10,000 years old, if not older. If further study confirms the preliminary findings, it would be the first mammoth carcass revealing signs of human interaction in the region. The carcass is in such good shape that much of its flesh is still intact, retaining its pink color. The...

Scepitical? Look at the clip and you tell me Red furry coat, giant tusks... elephants of any sort not native to the region, either! The Siberian Woolly Mammoth -which we are taught disappeared abruptly at the end of the last Ice Age (~8000 B.C.)- has long been a source of fascination, as on occasion examples are found in a highly-preserved, mummified state under the Arctic territory's thick layer of permafrost.  Similar in appearance to a modern elephant, the Mammoth was actually only slightly larger (~3m at the shoulder) yet with a shorter trunk, longer tusks, ears only 10% the size of their contemporary brethren,...

A BEAST lurches through icy waters in a sighting a paranormal investigator thinks could prove woolly mammoths are not extinct after all. The animal – thought to have mostly died out roughly 4,000 years ago – was apparently filmed wading through a river in the freezing wilds of Siberia. The jaw-dropping footage was caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia, it is claimed. He filmed the elephant-sized creature as it struggled against the racing water. Its hair matches samples recovered from mammoth remains regularly dug up from the permafrost in frozen Russia....