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Giant Crater Appears In Northern Siberia
New submitter DavidMZ writes: The Siberian Times reports on a large crater of unknown origin that has appeared in the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia. The Russian government has dispatched a group of scientists to investigate the 80-meter-wide crater. Anna Kurchatova from Siberia's Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Center believes the crater was a result of an explosion when a mixture of water, salt, and natural gas exploded underground. The Yamai Peninsula is known to hold Russia's biggest natural gas reserve."
Hmmm?
Where is the Doctor when we need him?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Let me guess. The explosion was caught on a Russian dashcam, amirite?
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
There are thousends upon thousends of similar holes (all filled with water) on Yamal peninsula. Many are few kilometers in diameter, most are smaller. This one may be new, but quite common in the area. Obviously it's due to gas eruptions of some kind. Landscape is like from the LOTR.
Explosive frackulence
Possibly, but what I find more surprising is that someone was able to discover such a small crater. 80m isn't big relative to how big Siberia is. It must have been in someone's backyard.
Maybe it was just Ivan's still or meth lab that exploded.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Derweze they found large gas deposits, a crane collapsed on-site and caused a rush of natural gas to the surface. USSR scientists thought it was best to burn it to reduce the environmental impact. That was in 1971, it is still burning.
It hatched.
Sadly I have to agree. Doing fieldwork among Russian villagers, I had long been used to the appalling prevalance of alcoholism among the male population, but the rise in heroin use (or heroin substitute use like krokodil) is yet another nail in the demographic suicide coffin.
That said, the Yamal Peninsula is Nenets country, and while alcoholism is known among that population, I'd be surprised if hard drug were common there yet, as it is probably off the supply chain.
what I find more surprising is that someone was able to discover such a small crater. 80m isn't big relative to how big Siberia is.
True that it is not that big. But would you consider monitoring area + taking images from satellite(s) as the reason? Why would they monitor the whole area? I don't know. But images from satellite nowadays are much much higher resolution (compared to 15~20 years ago when I was using them on my study) and could easily be analysed using a computer software. So any changes in the area would alert those who are monitoring.
First, if this is 80 meters in diameter, or 40 meters in radius, and say at a minimum 40 meters deep, that’ s not quite 10^9 kg of soil moved up order 40 meters, requiring (very roughly) the equivalent of 60 tons of TNT, at a minimum, and thus an equivalent magnitude of ~ 3.2 (again, roughly). Such an explosion should be detectable on seismological networks, such as the ones looking for nuclear testing.
Second, there is another mystery crater in Siberia - the Patomskiy crater. This one is in rock, not sediment, is about 160 meters in diameter, and is maybe 300 years old, but I have to wonder if they have a similar cause.
Third, I am interested in quark nuggets and other types of condensed matter, such as Q-Balls, generically called Compact UltraDense Objects (CUDOs) by Jan Rafelski of U. Arizona. If these things exist in the appropriate masses, they could cause holes such as this and the Patomskiy crater. Even better, if this were to be caused by transiting CUDO, it would cause a "linear earthquake, which should be easily recognizable in the seismic record.
It's* the Yeti it's = it is Learn this.
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There are lots of gas pockets in Siberian and under the polar seas that are locked by cold temperatures only. As warming increases, more and more of these will burst, accelerating climate change.
Scientists have been warning of these for many years. There has been lots of talks about a "tipping point" after which no reduction in man's greenhouse gas emissions would have any effect, when carbon levels in the atmosphere could increase because of cascading natural gas eruptions alone.
This is why it is so important to reduce carbon emissions.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
The hole is about the right size for one of Dune's sandworms.
I'm guessing that less than 2% of you know probably what the heck I'm talking about here.
It would be more likely to be the exit point of a miniature black hole. The entry point would likely be a very small hole.*
I call these exit wounds; the physics is that the exiting hypervelocity thing sets up a shock wave moving matter out of the way, and it's the shock wave excavates the material in the hole. (Even a black hole does this; a decent sized one (say 10^10 kg) is very small, so not much matter would be eaten during a transit of the Earth. It does, however, pull matter towards it and its wake sets up an explosive shock wave that fractures and evacuates material.)
* A black hole the mass of the Sun would have a radius of ~ 3 km, so one the mass of the Earth is a few mm, and a likely primordial black hole, with a mass of maybe 10^10 kg, would have a radius of 10^-17 m, or well below the size of an atomic nucleus. Such a small black hole would not "eat" much in its passage through the Earth, which might take 20 - 40 seconds or so, because not much would actually hit it. It's gravitational wake, however, would be another matter. Such a primordial black hole would leave a tiny entrance wound, but a large exit wound.