A crater in Siberia is expanding faster than expected due to climate change, scientists have discovered, saying it is now causing problems for the surrounding habitat.
Known as the ‘Gateway to Hell’ and located in the icy Yana Highlands, the Batagaika slump currently covers about 200 hectares of land and can be seen in satellite images taken from space.
The crater was first discovered in photographs taken in 1991 and has since grown in both width and depth as global warming causes permafrost (frozen ground sediment) to melt.
In a new study published in Geomorphology, glaciologist Alexander Kizyakov and his team used remote sensing and field data from laboratory samples captured in 2019 and 2023 to create a 3D representation of the permafrost melt rate.
They discovered that the crater is a whopping 90 meters deep and that there is little room to grow deeper because the melting of the permafrost has almost reached the rock at the bottom.
However, the crater continues to expand outward at an “accelerated pace.”
“The volume of the bowl-shaped retrogressive thaw subsidence (RTS) is increasing by about 1 million cubic meters per year,” Kizyakov wrote in the study.
This will pose problems for the nearby Batagay River as it will increase erosion on the riverbank and affect the surrounding habitat.
Kizyakov and his team noted that the rapidly expanding crater could also increase greenhouse gas emissions as frozen nutrients thaw and are released into the atmosphere.
They estimate that 4,000 to 5,000 tons of organic carbon previously trapped in permafrost is currently being released annually, and that this number is likely to increase every year.
Nikita Tananaev, a researcher at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, Russia, who was not involved in this study, told Atlas Obscura that he is not surprised by the crater’s expansion.
“If we observe the current climate over the Verkhoyansk Range, near the Batagay megaslump, it is no surprise that this phenomenon is growing so quickly,” says Tananaev.
Temperatures in the area have been above average in recent years.
“Higher retreat rates are expected to continue as we expect several more years of extremely high air temperatures to occur in this region,” he stated.