Dubbed The Gateway To The Underworld, A Sizable Crater In Siberia’s Permafrost Is Expanding By About 35 Million Cubic Feet Each Year, Posing A Major Threat To Our Planet’s Climate
A giant crater in Siberia’s permafrost is continuing to expand, and it has been referred to as the “gateway to the underworld.”
Officially, it is called the Batagay crater or megaslump. It formed in the 1970s when part of the hillside in the Yana Uplands caved in. However, the crater was not discovered until 1991 through satellite images.
The Batagay crater is the world’s largest megaslump. As of 2023, it measures 3,250 feet wide. The cliff face at the top of the formation, also known as the headwall, is 180 feet tall. When the crater opened, it exposed permafrost layers that had been frozen for up to 650,000 years.
It is the oldest permafrost in Siberia and the second-oldest in the world. The first is the relict ground ice in Canada’s Yukon Territory, which is around 740,000 years old.
Researchers have recently found out that the gateway is expanding by about 35 million cubic feet every year. The depression is sinking deeper into the ground, revealing new layers of ancient permafrost.
Additionally, the headwall is reduced by 40 feet per year due to melting permafrost. As the permafrost thaws, massive amounts of ice and sediment fall into the crater. Much of the melted material may stay in the crater, but some will wash into the Batagay River Valley.
According to Thomas Opel, a paleoclimatologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, the permafrost in the region is 80 percent ice, which is likely why the hillside collapsed.
The gateway is situated in a landscape of larch and birch woodlands. The terrain became a target of deforestation starting in the 1940s.
Deforestation caused the topsoil to erode more quickly and expose the permafrost lying underneath. Since it was mostly made of ice rather than sediment, it melted at a more rapid rate. Over the following decades, significant melting led to the collapse of the hillside.
gokturk_06 – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
The thawing of the permafrost also releases dangerous greenhouse gases into the air that had previously been trapped beneath the frozen ground.
“As the climate warms—I think there’s no shadow of a doubt it will warm—we will get increasing thaw of the permafrost and…there will be more slumps and more gullying, more erosion of the land surface,” said Professor Julian Morton, a geologist at the University of Sussex who led a study of the megaslump in 2017.
The release of greenhouse gases, particularly methane, leads to more warming and causes the permafrost to melt even more.
It’s why megaslumps like the Batagay crater pose a major threat to our planet’s climate. The treacherous landscape surrounding the crater is also hazardous to the locals.
The one plus side of the exposed permafrost is that researchers can study it to help them understand what past climates were like. Furthermore, the gateway offers them a glimpse into ancient plant and animal life.
Old tree stumps protrude from the ground. The decaying remains of long-dead mammoths and horses can be seen as well.
For example, in 2018, researchers discovered a preserved 42,000-year-old horse from the Pleistocene era.
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