There is the world’s largest sinkhole in Siberia, and photos from space show that it is growing rapidly.
It is the shape of a stingray, a horse crab, or a giant tadpole. It started out as a solid, invisible object in satellite images dating back to the 1960s.
The crater tripled in size between 1991 and 2018, according to the US Geological Survey.
The Batagay region, sometimes called Batagaika or “the road to hell,” represents a larger, often invisible problem affecting the entire planet.
What is this hole in Siberia?
The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the Earth, and this is rapidly melting the permafrost, which is thick soil that has been frozen forever – at least, it used to be.
Batagay Valley is not actually a crater at all. It is the world’s largest “retrogressive thaw slump”, a crater formed when permafrost melts causing the ground to collapse, creating a volcanic eruption as the earth’s edges collapse into the crater. .
There are thousands of thaws across 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 the most, let’s say, photogenic of topics,” said Roger Michaelides, a geophysicist at Washington University in St. Louis, he told Business Insider. “You’re talking a lot about frozen waste that’s underground, which by definition you usually can’t see unless it’s exposed in some way, like this megaslump.”
That makes the Batagay crater a famous permafrost figure and a sign of what lies ahead.
The Batagay megaslump could help determine the future of our planet
When the permafrost melts, 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.
Those are powerful greenhouse gases, which cause the earth’s temperature to rise even more, causing the permafrost to melt faster.
This vicious cycle can have dire consequences. Permafrost covers 15% of the land in the Northern Hemisphere. In total, it contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.
One study estimated that the melting of permafrost could produce as many greenhouse gases as an industrialized nation by 2100, if industry and nations don’t act aggressively today.
“There’s a lot we don’t know about this feedback loop and how it’s going to play out, but the potential is there for very large changes in climate that happen very quickly,” he said. Michaelides.
In short, melting permafrost can rapidly worsen the climate. But it’s still an amazing performance. Studying extreme areas like the Batagay megaslump can help scientists understand the melting of permafrost and predict the future.
In a study published in the journal Geomorphology in June, researchers used satellite and drone data to create 3D models of the megaslump and calculate its expansion over time.
They found that about 14 Giza glaciers and permafrost had melted in Batagay. The crater’s volume increases by a million cubic meters every year.
“These values are truly impressive,” Alexander Kizyakov, the study’s lead author and scientist at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told BI in an email.
“Our results show how quickly permafrost degradation is happening,” he added.
Researchers also estimate that the megaslump produces about 4,000 to 5,000 tons of carbon each year. That’s roughly equivalent to annual gas emissions from 1,700 to 2,100 US households.
Michaelides said the numbers didn’t surprise him, but they could help inform models of future permafrost melting and emissions.
“I think there’s a lot we can learn from Batagaika, not only in terms of understanding how Batagaika will change over time, but also how the same elements might appeared and evolved over the Arctic,” said Michaelides. “Even if it’s a tenth or a hundredth the size of Batagaika, the physics is really the same.”