A giant hole is tearing through the earth in Siberia, and photos from space show it’s expanding rapidly. It started as “a sliver,” barely visible in declassified satellite images from the 1960s. Now it’s a precipice of sheer cliffs, clearly visible from space.
The sinkhole tripled in size between 1991 and 2018, according to the US Geological Survey. Batagay Crater, sometimes referred to as Batagaika or “Gateway to Hell”, is representative of a much larger, often invisible problem affecting the entire planet.
The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the Earth, and this is leading to the rapid thawing of permafrost, which is a thick layer of permanently frozen soil—at least, it used to be.
Batagay Crater is not actually a crater. It is the world’s largest “retrograde thaw collapse,” meaning a sinkhole that forms when thawing permafrost causes the ground to give way, creating a landslide as the land at the edges collapses into the sinkhole.
There are thousands of meltdowns in the Arctic. But the size of the Batagay “crater” earned it the title of megaslump. It is named after the nearby town of Batagay.
“Permafrost is not, let’s say, the most photogenic subject,” said Roger Michaelides, a geophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis, for Business Insider. “We’re mostly talking about frozen ground underground, which by definition you often can’t see unless it’s been exposed somehow, like in this megaslump.”
Batagay could help decode the future of our planet
This makes the Batagay Pit something of a permafrost celebrity and a harbinger of what lies ahead.
As the permafrost thaws, all the dead plants and animals that have been frozen in it for centuries begin to decompose, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. These are powerful heat-trapping gases that cause global temperatures to rise further, triggering even faster thawing of permafrost.
This vicious circle could have disastrous effects. Permafrost covers 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere. In total, it contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.
One study has estimated that thawing permafrost could emit as much of the planet-warming gas as a major industrialized nation by 2100, if industries and countries don’t aggressively control their own emissions now.
Thawing permafrost could rapidly worsen the climate crisis
In short, thawing permafrost could rapidly exacerbate the climate crisis. But it is still a mysterious process. Studying extreme sites like the Batagay megaslump can help scientists understand permafrost thaw and look into the future.
In a study published in the journal Geomorphology, researchers used satellite and drone data to build 3D models of the megaslump and calculate its expansion over time.
They found that the amount of ice and permafrost melted at Batagay is the equivalent of 14 Pyramids at Giza. The volume of the crater increases by about one million cubic meters every year.
“These values are really impressive,” Alexander Kizyakov, lead author of the study and a scientist at Lomonosov State University in Moscow, told BI in an email.
“Our results demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation is occurring,” he added, he writes ScienceAlert.
The researchers also calculated that the megaslump releases about 4,000 to 5,000 tons of carbon each year. This is roughly as much as the annual emissions generated by the energy use of 1,700-2,100 US homes.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
