A crater so large and deep it's known as the 'mouth to hell' is still expanding, with locals claiming to hear strange booms coming from the depths.
The Batagay megaslump, as its official name is, started as a small crack in the 1960s and has since grown into a colossus that grows at least ten meters annually, and can potentially reach up to thirty meters.
It's shaped like a tadpole, but is no baby in the world of sinkholes, with more than 35 million cubic meters of soil lost in the area in northeastern Siberia. Russiasince the 1990s.
The reason for the relentless growth is that the permafrost is melting climate changemaking the ground around it much less stable.
It's also the reason sinkholes are becoming more widespread around the world, sometimes because of melting ice and sometimes because of wetter and more extreme weather.
The crater in the Yana highlands in northern Yakutia also contributes to climate change, as its further growth releases carbon previously locked up in the ground.
People have been fascinated by it for years, both for scientific reasons and because of its strange and potentially terrifying nature.
As the crater expands, it exposes chunks of ground that have been buried for thousands of years since the last ice age. This can tell us a lot about the geology of the area and how it has developed over time.
As the crater expanded, several preserved animal remains have been revealed, including fossilized remains of mammoths, horses and musk oxen.
The Batagay megaslump isn't the only gigantic crater known as the “Mouth of Hell.” There is also a fiery pit in Turkmenistan that has been burning since the 1980s.
Engineers have been lighting methane in the Darvaza gas crater with the intention of burning it down and making the area safer, but it has never stopped – and is now lighting up the Karakum Desert, where the 70-metre-long fire hole has even become a tourist attraction.
That hell mouth is man-made, but the one in Russia is a natural pit – even though it was humans who changed the climate that made this possible.
Julian Murton wrote last year in Permafrost and Periglacial Processes that the Russian crater “will probably eventually stabilize” as a result of reaching the limits of the surrounding topography, even though it is currently growing rapidly.
But it will take years to decades for this to happen, and there is still the possibility that it will eat the landscape again afterwards.
He said the collapse was “exceptional” both for the insights it could provide and for the example it provided of how sensitive ice-rich permafrost is to abrupt thaw due to terrain disturbance.
“Growth has likely accelerated due to climate warming and moistening,” he said.
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