A 200-acre wide, nearly 300-foot deep pit in the Yana highlands of Siberia, known as the ‘Batagaika Crater,’ is expanding faster than expected due to climate change.
Sometimes called the ‘Gateway to Hell,’ the Batagaika Crater first formed when melting ‘permafrost’ soil within the Siberian tundra began to release tons of previously frozen methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into Earth’s atmosphere.
Now, new research has discovered that the rate of methane and other carbon gases released as the crater deepens has reached between 4000 and 5000 tons per year.
The findings, according to the study’s lead author, ‘demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation occurs.’
He warns the crater is soon likely to leak all the remaining greenhouse gas it has left.
A 200-acre wide, nearly 300-foot deep pit in the Yana highlands of Siberia, known as the ‘Batagaika Crater’ (above), is expanding faster than expected due to climate change
New research has discovered that the rate of methane and other carbon gases released as the crater (above) deepens has hit an estimated 4000 to 5000 tons per year
Glaciologist Alexander Kizyakov, the study’s lead author, 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 nearly reached the bedrock, meaning the the melting permafrost that remains melt, and thus generate further collapse, has nearly almost all melted.
But Kizyakov, who teaches at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, noted that there is still opportunities for the melt to continue sideways.
‘Expansion along the margins and upslope is expected,’ Kizyakov told Atlas Obscura.
‘This lateral expansion is also limited by the proximity of bedrock, the top of which apparently rises to the saddle between the nearest mountains about 550 meters [1805 feet] uphill,’ he explained.
Above, 1999 (left) and 2016 (right) NASA satellite images of the Batagaika Crater’s expansion
The team was able to develop a 3D model of how the icy permafrost has given way during its decades-long collapse using wide-ranging data from a variety of independent sources.
High resolution remote sensing — collected both from satellite data and via drone flights over the Batagaika — was combined with permafrost samples and other soil samples on field expeditions in 2019 and 2023.
That data was all fed into their computer models.
This model helped them to map and predict the melting of the underlying geological structure of the permafrost to figure out how much and what materials are thawing inside it and then what’s released, whether into the water table or the atmosphere.
The results revealed, as Kizyakov told Popular Science, ‘how dynamically the landforms in permafrost areas change.’
Nikita Tananaev, a researcher at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, who was not a contributor to the new research, noted that just this leakage from the crater is altering the nearby ecosystems permanently.
‘This will lead to significant alterations to the riverine habitat, and the effect of sediment escaping the slump [the Batagaika crater] is even seen in the Yana River, the major river in the vicinity,’ Tananaev said.