A 200-acre wide and nearly 300-foot-deep pit in Siberia’s Yana Highlands, known as the ‘Batagaika Crater,’ is expanding faster than expected due to climate change.
Sometimes called the “Gateway to Hell,” Batagaika Crater first formed when melting “permafrost” soil within the Siberian tundra began releasing tons of previously frozen methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. from the earth.
Now, new research has found that the rate of methane and other carbon gases released as the crater deepens has reached between 4,000 and 5,000 tons per year.
The findings, according to the study’s lead author, “demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation occurs.”
It warns that the crater is likely to soon lose all of its remaining greenhouse gas.
A 200-acre wide, nearly 300-foot-deep pit in Siberia’s Yana Highlands, known as the ‘Batagaika Crater’ (above), is expanding faster than expected due to climate change.
New research has found that the rate of methane and other carbon gases released as the crater (above) deepens has reached an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 tonnes per year.
Glaciologist Alexander Kizyakov, lead author of the study, worked with a dozen other researchers on the new study, published this month in the journal. Geomorphology.
Kizyakov and his colleagues found that the crater has almost reached the bedrock, meaning that the melting permafrost, which therefore drives further collapse, has almost completely melted.
But Kizyakov, who teaches at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, noted that there are still opportunities for the melt to continue laterally.
“An expansion along the margins and upwards is expected,” Kizyakov said. dark atlas.
“This lateral expansion is also limited by the proximity of the bedrock, the summit of which apparently rises to the col between the nearest mountains about 550 meters (1,805 feet) uphill,” he explained.
Above, NASA satellite images from 1999 (left) and 2016 (right) of the expanding Batagaika crater.
The team was able to develop a 3D model of how frozen permafrost has given way during its decades-long collapse using a wide range of data from a variety of independent sources.
High-resolution remote sensing, collected from both satellite data and drone flights over Batagaika, was combined with permafrost and other soil samples on field expeditions in 2019 and 2023.
All of that data was entered into their computer models.
This model helped them map and predict the melting of the underlying geological structure of the permafrost to determine how much and what materials are thawing within it and then what is released, either into the water table or into the atmosphere.
The results revealed, as Kizyakov said popular science“how dynamically landforms change in permafrost areas.”
Nikita Tananaev, a researcher at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, who was not involved in the new research, noted that precisely this crater leak is permanently altering nearby ecosystems.
“This will cause significant alterations in the riparian habitat, and the effect of sediments escaping from the collapse (the Batagaika crater) is observed even in the Yana River, the main river in the surrounding area,” Tananaev said.
