The first crater was found in 2014 in the far north of western Siberia, the result of a spontaneous underground explosion that sent earth flying in all directions. More discoveries followed, with some of the holes more than 150 feet deep.
The cause was a mystery at first, but scientists eventually linked the exploding land to climate change and rising temperatures. As the permafrost thaws, they determined, pockets of methane can form below the surface.
But questions remained: Why were the explosions happening only in Siberia, when the Arctic as a whole is warming even faster than the rest of the planet? And will the blasts become more frequent if the planet continues to heat up?
Now, a new study in the journal Science of the Total Environment is offering answers.
Helge Hellevang, an environmental geoscientist at the University of Oslo and lead author on the new study, said he first got interested in the craters, on the Yamal and Gyda peninsulas, after watching a short BBC documentary about them. “We immediately wanted to understand how these could form,” Dr. Hellevang said.
His team examined the literature, he said, but none of the published research on the craters gave a satisfactory explanation of why the craters formed on the two northern peninsulas and not in the “vast areas of permafrost elsewhere in the Arctic.”
So Dr. Hellevang and his colleagues decided to take a closer look at the data. They started with a review of published observations in English and Russian. Based on that review, the team created its own computer models for the origin of the explosions.
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The post The Siberian Tundra Is Exploding. New Research Helps Explain Why. appeared first on New York Times.
