The hole truth

The first, whose size has been estimated to be 50-100 metres across and 60 metres deep, has been found to have an icy lake at the bottom of it and was discovered by pilots in July while flying over a remote area of Siberia. The second chasm, in the Taz district, is only about 15 metres wide. The third hole, in the Taymyr Peninsula, was accidentally found by reindeer herders and is a nearly perfect cone-shaped hole about 4 metres wide and 60-100 metres deep.

“It is not like this is the work of men,” one expert told the Siberian Times, which has been big on the giant crater story from the beginning. “But it also doesn’t look like natural formation.”

Some insist that it is related to the gas industry prevalent in the area, Bovanenkovskoye, but the holes are far away from gas lines. Other theories include stray missiles, meteorites, global warming, and there is, of course, no shortage of theories about extraterrestrial involvement. Some have even called them “hell mouths”.

There’s now finally a substantiated theory about what created the crater. According to the website LiveScience, some experts now believe the strange cavities may be a type of permafrost sinkhole. Speaking to LiveScience, Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said in his view the sinkholes in Siberia were caused by water from melting permafrost or ice.

Romanovsky told LiveScience that somehow, rather than sucking collapsed material inside of them, these holes appear to have pushed material out, creating an explosion.

Andrei Plekhanov, an archaeologist at the Scientific Centre of Arctic Studies in Salekhard, Russia, who led the Russian expedition, believes it is rising temperatures and not aliens that are the cause of the holes. He said the warmer summers in the region during 2012 and 2013 (warmer by 5 degrees Celsius) may have contributed to the permafrost thawing, before collapsing and releasing the methane gas trapped below the icy ground.

According to a recent Nature article, air near the bottom of the crater contained unusually high concentrations of methane — up to 9.6 per cent — in tests conducted at the site on 16 July by Plekhanov and his team. Air normally contains just 0.000179 per cent methane.

Plekhanov explained to Nature that the conclusion is preliminary. He would like to study how much methane is contained in the air trapped inside the crater’s walls. Such a task, however, could be difficult.

“Its rims are slowly melting and falling into the crater,” the researcher told the science publication. “You can hear the ground falling, you can hear the water running; it’s rather spooky.”

The Russian team has suggested drilling artificial holes into the permafrost, to release pressure and prevent more ‘sinkholes’ from opening up as it would be dangerous for locals.

“If (a release) happens at the Bovanenkovskoye gas field that is only 30 km away, it could lead to an accident, and the same if it happens in a village,” says Plekhanov.

With such craters and sinkholes opening up all across the world, from the US to Venezuela and even Britain, delving into the mystery behind what is making our ground more and more unstable wouldn’t be an unwise suggestion.

— Aleesha Matharu