New 50-metre deep 'crater' found blasted open on Yamal peninsular, Siberia

Anna Liesowska
The Siberian Times
Sat, 29 Aug 2020 22:12 UTC

© by Vesti Yamal

The new funnel filmed from air by the team of Yamal-based TV station. July 2020

Blocks of soil and ice thrown hundreds of metres from epicentre of the funnel at the Yamal peninsula.

The recently-formed new hole or funnel is the latest to be seen in northern Siberia since the phenomenon was first registered in 2014.

It was initially spotted by chance from the air by a Vesti Yamal TV crew en route from an unrelated assignment.

A group of scientists then made an expedition to examine the large cylindrical crater which has a depth of up to 50 metres.

Such funnels are believed to be caused by the build up of methane gas in pockets of thawing permafrost under the surface.

© Vasily Bogoyavlensky

Pictures of B1, the very first funnel seen in summer 2014 on the Yamal peninsula, and a map of the first four funnels in both Yamal and Taymyr peninsula.

Scientist Dr Evgeny Chuvilin, a leading researcher at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, said: 'What we saw today is striking in its size and grandeur.

'These are the colossal forces of nature that create such objects.'

The 'crater' - these holes are called hydrolaccoliths or bulgunnyakhs by scientists - is given the number 17, and is seen as the most impressive of the large holes to suddenly appear in recent years as the permafrost thaws.

Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky, of the Russian Oil and Gas Research Institute in Moscow, told Vesti Yamal: 'This object is unique. It carries a lot of additional scientific information, which I am not yet ready to disclose.

'This is a subject for scientific publications. We have to analyse all this, and build three-dimensional models.'

© Vesti Yamal

A new funnel was noticed by chance by a crew of Vesti Yamal TV as they were flying from an unrelated assignment. Pictures from July 2020 by Vesti Yamal

© Vesti Yamal

The craters appear because 'gas-saturated cavities are formed in the permafrost...

'In a literal sense, a void space filled with gas with high pressure. The covering layer distends, the thickness of which is 5-10 metres approximately.'

Explosions have happened in swelling pingos, or mounds in the tundra which erupts when the gas builds up under a thick cap of ice.

Bogoyavlensky has previously claimed that human activities, like drilling for gas from the vast Yamal reserves could be a factor in the eruptions.

He is concerned at the risk of ecological disasters if pingos build up close to a gas pipelines, production facilities or residential areas.

'In a number of areas, pingos - as we see both from satellite data and with our own eyes during helicopter inspections - literally prop up gas pipes,' he said previously.

Comment: In Pierre Lescaudron's book Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection he explicates the possible factors involved in earthquakes, volcanoes and sinkholes. The following extract may help explain the mysterious and sudden appearance of some of these craters in Siberia, why their proximity to methane deposits may be relevant, and why some have reportedly been accompanied by a 'big bang' and a 'pillar of fire':

So, most of the Earth's crust can become highly conductive if subjected to mechanical stress/shock, for example the type of stress due to the slowing down and opening up of the Earth's lithosphere described above. When high conductivity is reached, electric current can occur between ground regions of different electric potential.¹ This current being fed, among other factors, by the change in surface-core E-field mentioned previously.

At this point a second phenomenon called piezo electricity might itervene. Some crystals, in particular quartz which is very frequent in granite rocks,² will deform if subjected to electric current (that's almost the reverse of the above described phenomenon where mechanical deformation triggers electric current).

One could thus hypothesize that earthquakes are not unlike underground lightning. Earthquakes being to underground electric phenomenon what lightning is to atmospheric electric phenomenon: a simple charge rebalancing process generating some mechanical side effects: air waves (thunder) for lightning and crustal waves (seismic tremors) for earthquakes.

Footnotes:
1^ Such effects, combined with emissions of gasses from inside the earth, another consequence of 'opening up', could be another factor in the eruption of anomalous fires and explosions.

2^ Interestingly most mountain range are made of granite, concomitantly mountain range are also some of the most quake prone geological formations.

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