Can extra-solar gamma rays reach the Earth's surface?

Question

Can gamma rays of high enough energy entering our planet's atmosphere reach the surface (50% probability)?

Or, in other words, is there a window for extremely high-energy gamma rays like for the visible spectrum and radio?

This figure, from Electromagnetic Spectrum, shows that the penetration increases with increasing energy, but it seems to level out at about 25 km altitude:

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/Images/introduction/emsurface.gif

There are no units on the X-axis, and thus it does not show the energy for the highest energy gamma rays for this figure. This does not rule out a window at even higher energies.

Answer 1

Propagation of very energetic photons through medium looks like this. The photon enter the medium, at some point it scatters off an electron or creates an electron-positron pair in a coulomb field, the initial energy distributed between the two daughter particles. Each of these particles then "splits" again, and so on, and as a result an electromagnetic shower develops. The typical length at which this "doubling" occurs is called the radiation length. This length is calculated (and measured) for many materials; it is a property of a medium and does not depend on the energy of the initial photon. For air at normal pressure and temperature is it of the order of hundreds of meters (and it is increases with pressure drop). So, it means that the initial extremely energetic photon will hardly make it into the troposphere, not to mention ground.

Answer 2

I found a reference through Google Books, Very high energy gamma-ray astronomy by Trevor Weekes, which says that the atmosphere is essentially opaque to high-energy gamma rays, equivalent to a meter-thick wall of lead. We are able to do gamma-ray astronomy with ground-based telescopes by detecting the decay products of the gamma rays' interactions with atmospheric particles, but the photons themselves never (well, essentially never) reach the ground.

If you'd like to look up the book yourself, the information I found is at the beginning of chapter 2.