One study of tree rings in willow shrubs found among the debris thrown out by the explosion that created the first crater discovered in 2014 suggests the plants had been experiencing stress since the 1940s. “These gas-filled mounds form in the order of years.” “Pingos take decades to form and last a long time,” says Sue Natali, an Arctic ecologist who studies permafrost and director of the Arctic programme at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And instead of freezing water, the uplift appears to be caused by a build-up of gas beneath the ground. They swell “very fast, rising to several metres” before they blow their top suddenly, explains Chuvilin. It is clear that the mounds in north-west Siberia are behaving differently. In most parts of the Arctic, however, these mounds tend to eventually collapse in on themselves rather than explode. Some in Canada have been found to be up to 1,200 years old.
Also known in Russia by the local Yakut name “bulgunnyakhs”, they tend to rise and fall with the seasons. As the water freezes, it expands to create a mound. Pingos are dome-shaped hills that form when a layer of frozen ground is pushed up by water that has managed to flow underneath it and started to freeze. “Analysis based on satellite imagery shows that a blast makes a giant hole in the place of a pingo, or mound,” says Chuvilin. The name gives some clue to how they are thought to form. But as more Arctic craters have been studied in various stages of their evolution, they have become known as “gas emission craters”. Some scientists have compared the craters to cryovolcanoes – volcanoes that spew ice instead of lava – thought to exist in some of the distant parts of our solar system on Pluto, Saturn’s moon Titan and the dwarf planet Ceres. It brings the total number of confirmed craters to have been discovered on Yamal and the neighbouring Gydan Peninsula to 17.Ĭhuvilin is one of a group of Russian scientists – collaborating with colleagues from around the world – who have been visiting these craters to take samples and measurements in the hope of understanding more about what is going on beneath the tundra.
#The long dark map of mystery lake tv
The latest crater was spotted in August this year by a TV crew as they flew past with a team of scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences during an expedition with local authorities in Yamal.
Analysis of satellite images later revealed that crater – now known as GEC-1 – formed sometime between 9 October and 1 November 2013. The scientists who visited it – including Mariana Leibman, chief scientist of the Earth Cryosphere Institute, who has been studying the permafrost in Siberia for more than 40 years – described it as an entirely new feature in permafrost. That hole, which was around 66ft (20m) wide and up to 171ft (52m) deep, was discovered by helicopter pilots passing overhead in 2014, around 26 miles (42km) from the Bovanenkovo gas field on the Yamal Peninsula. This 164-foot-deep (50m) hole could hold key parts of a puzzle that has been bothering him for the past six years since the first of these mysterious holes was discovered elsewhere on the Yamal Peninsula. The layers of earth and rock exposed further inside the cylindrical hole are almost black and a pool of water is already forming at the bottom by the time scientists reach it.Īmong them is Evgeny Chuvilin, a geologist at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, based in Moscow, Russia, who has flown out to this remote corner of the Yamal Peninsula in north-west Siberia to take a look. It gives some idea of just how violently this hole in the middle of the Siberian Arctic materialised.įrom the air, the freshly exposed dirt stands out against the green tundra and dark lakes around it. The roots of plants – newly exposed around the rim – show signs of scorching. It appeared suddenly and explosively, leaving a ragged pockmark on the landscape.Īround the crater’s edge, the earth is a torn, grey jumble of ice and clods of permafrost.
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