Source: Collective Evolution
The Siberian permafrost has been a massive freezer for everything buried within it for hundreds of thousands of years. But climate change has provoked an alarming defrost of the tundra.
“Permafrost is a silent ticking time bomb,” explains Robert Spencer, an environmental scientist at Florida State University, because as it thaws, the dirt can release bacteria, carbon, methane, viruses, and more.
Huge holes have even begun appearing seemingly out of the blue, and in other places, the tundra is bubbling beneath people’s feet.
Now, new research has revealed that one of the permafrost’s biggest craters in the region, which is referred to by the local Yakutian people as the “doorway to the underworld”, is growing so quickly that it’s exposing forests, carcasses, and up to 200,000 years of historical climate records. It’s called the Batagaika crater, which is a “megaslump” or “thermokarst.”
