The so-called “Gate to Hell”, the Batagaika Crater, was first formed after the melting of the permafrost within the Siberian tundra
A 200-acre-wide, nearly 90-meter-deep sinkhole in Siberia’s Yana Highlands known as the “Batagaika Crater” is expanding faster than expected due to climate change.
The so-called “Hell’s Gate,” Batagaika Crater, first formed when melting permafrost within the Siberian tundra began releasing tons of previously frozen methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the Earth’s atmosphere.
New research reveals that the rate of methane and other carbon gases being released as the crater deepens has reached between 4000 and 5000 tonnes per year.
The findings, according to the head of the study, “highlight how quickly the retreat of the permafrost is happening”.
He warns that the crater is likely to release any remaining greenhouse gas soon.
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 almost reached the bedrock, meaning the “permafrost” has almost completely melted.
The team was able to develop a three-dimensional model of how the “permafrost” has receded during its decades-long collapse using wide-ranging data from a variety of independent sources.
High-resolution remote sensing, collected from both satellite data and drone flights over Batagaica, was combined with permafrost and other soil samples in field missions in 2019 and 2023.
The above process, and the transfer of the findings to special computer models, helped them to map and predict the melting of the underlying geological structure of the permafrost to understand how much and what materials thaw inside it and then what is released, either into the water table or in the atmosphere.
The results revealed, as Kizyakov told Popular Science, “how dynamically landforms change in permafrost regions.”
Nikita Tananaev, a researcher at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, who did not contribute to the new research, noted that this leakage from the crater is permanently altering nearby ecosystems.
“This will lead to significant changes in the river’s ecosystem and the effect of sediment escaping from sedimentation [του κρατήρα Μπαταγκάικα] it can even be seen in the Yana River, the most important river in the vicinity,” Tananaev said.
Source: Skai
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