It’s no secret that Siberia’s permafrost is on thin ice. Conditions vary so widely in these areas that huge holes appear out of nowhere and, in some places, the tundra literally bubbles under the feet of individuals. However, one of the largest craters in the region, known to the local Yakutian people as the “door to the underworld” (the Batagaika crater) is growing so rapidly that it is uncovering forests, corpses, prehistoric animals and up to 200,000 years of historical climatic records.
It is true that many of these thermokarsts have appeared throughout Siberia in recent years, but researchers believe that Batagaika, located about 660 kilometers northeast of Yakutsk, could be an anomaly.
Not only is the crater the largest of its kind, almost 1 km long and 86 meters deep, it is getting bigger by the minute.
The study, presented in 2016 to the journal Quaternary Research by Frank Günther of the Alfred Wegener Institute (Germany) revealed that the crater wall has grown at an average of 10 meters per year in the last decade, according to the observations. In warmer years, the growth has even been up to 30 meters per year.
As temperatures warm in the Northern Hemisphere, experts predict further collapse of the earth. The fact that this crater is continuously growing means that it will get deeper and deeper every year.
Climate change
The heat, the floods … have worsened the melting of the permafrost contributing to the size of the crater. But this increasing depth will expose carbon pools that have been locked up for thousands of years (which add up to the same amount of carbon as is in the atmosphere).
As the crater continues to melt, these greenhouse gases could be released into the atmosphere, causing further warming. Bad news for global warming.
Is it all bad news?
Not fortunately. A study published in February 2017 in the same journal Quaternary Research showed that the layers exposed by the crater could reveal 200,000 years of climate data. According to experts, the exposed sediments could be helpful in understanding how Siberia’s climate changed in the past, and predicting how it will change in the future. And it is that the climatic history of Siberia is quite unknown to us.
Today, the levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are much higher than they were when the Earth emerged from its last Ice Age and we have exceeded 400 parts per million of CO2, compared to 280 parts per million at the time of the end of the last ice age.
“The Batagaika site contains a remarkably thick sequence of permafrost deposits, including two wood-rich layers that are interpreted as forest beds indicating past climates as hot as the current climate,” says Murton.
Scientists plan to drill wells in the region to analyze more sediments and gain a more accurate understanding of what happened in the past of this vast region of Russia.
“Ultimately, we are trying to see if climate change during the last Ice Age [in Siberia] was characterized by great variability: warming and cooling, warming and cooling as happened in the North Atlantic region,” concludes Murton.
Reference: Preliminary paleoenvironmental analysis of permafrost deposits at Batagaika megaslump, Yana Uplands, northeast Siberia. Julian B. Murton, Mary E. Edwards, Anatoly V. Lozhkin, Patricia M. Anderson. Cambridge University Press, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/qua.2016.15
