| Title | There Could be More Siberian Craters | |
| Date | Saturday February 28 2015, @11:59PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the the-earth-has-a-gas-problem dept. | ||
Remember that story about the Siberian mystery crater last June? Turns out there are six more and, as Siberian Times reports, there could be dozens of others which popped out recently enough to allow satellite comparisons between before and after.
Respected Moscow scientist Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky has called for 'urgent' investigation of the new phenomenon amid safety fears.
Until now, only three large craters were known about in northern Russia with several scientific sources speculating last year that heating from above the surface due to unusually warm climatic conditions, and from below, due to geological fault lines, led to a huge release of gas hydrates, so causing the formation of these craters in Arctic regions.
Two of the newly-discovered large craters - also known as funnels to scientists - have turned into lakes, revealed Professor Bogoyavlensky, deputy director of the Moscow-based Oil and Gas Research Institute, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Examination using satellite images has helped Russian experts understand that the craters are more widespread than was first realised, with one large hole surrounded by as many as 20 mini-craters, The Siberian Times can reveal.
-- more after the break ---
Professor Bogoyavlensky told The Siberian Times: 'One of the most interesting objects here is the crater that we mark as B2, located 10 kilometres to the south of Bovanenkovo. On the satellite image you can see that it is one big lake surrounded by more than 20 small craters filled with water.
'Studying the satellite images we found out that initially there were no craters nor a lake. Some craters appeared, then more. Then, I suppose that the craters filled with water and turned to several lakes, then merged into one large lake, 50 by 100 metres in diameter.[...]
Not only the new craters constantly forming on Yamal show that the process of gas emission is ongoing actively.
Professor Bogoyavlensky shows the picture of one of the Yamal lakes, taken by him from the helicopter and points on the whitish haze on its surface.He commented: 'This haze that you see on the surface shows that gas seeps that go from the bottom of the lake to the surface. We call this process 'degassing'.
To appease your apocalyptic taste over the weekend, have a refresher in: clathrate gun hypothesis, limnic eruption (with Lake Nyos disaster and the management of Lake Kivu), other gas discharges like mazuku (CO2 discharge - with the Mammoth Mountain one which kills lots of trees by CO2 suffocation and killed three members of the ski patrol in 2006)
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printed from SoylentNews, There Could be More Siberian Craters on 2024-04-24 09:01:01