Batagaika Crater: Gateway To A Mysterious Underground World Can Unlock The Secrets Of Our Planet’s Past And Future

MessageToEagle.com – Located in Siberia, the Batagaika Crater is known as the “Gateway to the Underworld” by local people who fear to go near the massive crater.

The massive crater that first   appeared about 25 years ago in the frozen heart of Siberia can unlock the secrets of our planet’s past and can give us vital clues about the future.

The Batagaika crater, also known as known as the Batagaika Megaslump is about a kilometer long and 90m deep. Major flooding in 2008 increased the size of the depression which grows at up to 20 meters a year. When the crater formed the land sunk, and has continued to do so, evidently speeded by recent warmer temperatures melting the permafrost, so unbinding the layers on the surface and below.

Scientists think it is very important to study the changes around and inside the crater as they are related to climate changes. The Batagaika crater is by many researchers considered a sign of the rate at which the world is warming. Smaller craters have been appearing increasingly across the northern hemisphere.

The melting of the permafrost represents one of humanity’s greatest fears for it contains vast amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide.

If it were all to melt – a process that would start on an epic scale after about four degrees of warming – it would likely tip the planet into an extreme scenario the full horror of which is hard to describe.

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Scientists are currently trying to date the layers of soil which had been frozen in time as permafrost, and gather samples of plants and soil. These samples will be compared with the data of similar objects in Greenland, China, Antarctica. Data on ancient soils and vegetation will help to reconstruct the history of the Earth.

Professor Julian Murton, a geologist at the University of Sussex, has just returned from a trip to the crater to study its cliffs, which provide a new source of geological information that potentially dates back some 200,000 years.

“In some sense, Batagaika does provide a view to what has happened in the past and what is likely to happen in the future.

As the climate warms – I think there’s no shadow of a doubt it will warm – we will get increasing thaw of the permafrost and increasingly development of these ‘thermokarst’ features. There will be more slumps and more gullying, more erosion of the land surface.

I think there’s growing evidence over the last few decades that thermokarst activity in the northern hemisphere has been increasing in extent and intensity.

However, it will be sometime before Siberia begins to melt dramatically. It can still experience temperatures as low as minus -68C.,” Professor Murton said.

The area is one of the coldest places on the planet, and competes with Oymyakon, from the same region, for the title of the world’s coldest inhabited place.

Professor Murton also confirmed he had not found any sign of a mysterious tunnel leading to an underworld, physical or spiritual.

“At the bottom of the slump is rock … I haven’t seen any gateway to hell,” he said.

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