Mysterious Siberian Crater Is Just One of Many

New submitter Sardaukar86 sends this excerpt from a Washington Post report: In the middle of last summer came news of a bizarre occurrence no one could explain. Seemingly out of nowhere, a massive crater appeared in one of the planet's most inhospitable lands. Early estimates said the crater, nestled in a land called "the ends of the Earth" where temperatures can sink far below zero, yawned nearly 100 feet in diameter. The saga deepened. The Siberian crater wasn't alone. There were two more, ratcheting up the tension in a drama that hit its climax as a probable explanation surfaced. Global warming had thawed the permafrost, which had caused methane trapped inside the icy ground to explode.

Now, however, researchers fear there are more craters than anyone knew — and the repercussions could be huge. Russian scientists have now spotted a total of seven craters, five of which are in the Yamal Peninsula. Two of those holes have since turned into lakes. And one giant crater is rimmed by a ring of at least 20 mini-craters, the Siberian Times reported.

Comments

stop the pseudo-scientific bullshit

[iggymanz]

1. This land is geologically YOUNG, it is less than ten thousand years old

2. The earth itself is warming the underside of the permafrost, even if there is contribution from global warming https://cage.uit.no/news/metha...

Thus there is no reason to wail about some imagined harbinger of doom because of these sinkholes.

It never combusted.

[johncandale]

It never combusted. The permafrost melted and it all just went in the atmosphere and the loss of mass caused a sinkhole. The summary is bad. There was never a explosion besides the dust settling. Think ice sheet breaking. Once it pasts melting point, it accelerates fast enough to watch it with your eyes. If this keep happening most of the timescale modals of global warming are off and we will have reached a weird point-of-no-return due to the major mass of methane added to the atmosphere all at once.

Re:Don't explosions create seismic waves?

[tompaulco]

If these are truly explosions ejecting many tons of earth out of these holes, wouldn't they be detected by seismographs around the world, or at least in Russia? I think they should plant seismic detectors in the area so they can immediately detect the next explosion and quickly send a research team to site.

Yes, if there had been a large explosion, even if it was not combustion, that amount of earth moving would have been measurable by seismic instruments thousands of miles away. Quarry explosions have been known to display as earthquakes as large as 2.7 on the Richter scale and felt for hundreds of miles, and those would pale in comparison to the amount of earth movement involved in the Siberian craters. It is much more likely that they escaping gas just gradually caused sinkholes, which would still create seismic events, but would be more likely many smaller ones and probably would not pick up on instruments unless they were within 100 miles.