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Land in Russia’s Arctic Blows ‘Like a Bottle of Champagne’

EntertainmentLand in Russia’s Arctic Blows ‘Like a Bottle of Champagne’

MOSCOW — A natural phenomenon first observed by scientists just six years ago and now recurring with alarming frequency in Siberia is causing the ground to explode spontaneously and with tremendous force, leaving craters up to 100 feet deep.

When Yevgeny Chuvilin, a Moscow-based geologist with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, arrived this summer at the rim of the latest blast site, called Crater 17, “it left quite an impression,” he said.

The pit plunged into darkness, surrounded by the table-flat, featureless tundra. As Mr. Chuvilin stood looking in, he said, slabs of dirt and ice occasionally peeled off the permafrost of the crater wall and tumbled in.

“It was making noises. It was like something alive,” Mr. Chuvilin said.

While initially a mystery, scientists have established that the craters appearing in the far north of western Siberia are caused by subterranean gases, and the recent flurry of explosions is possibly related to global warming, Mr. Chuvilin said.

“It goes off like a bottle of champagne,” Mr. Chuvilin said.

The most recent to blow, at Crater 17 site on the Yamal Peninsula, was one of the more dramatic.

A reindeer herder was near enough to hear the blast but was unhurt. The Russian scientific expedition arrived by helicopter about a month later, in August. The crater was at least 100 feet deep.

Though the Russian government is encouraging oil, natural gas and mining ventures in the far north, the area is still too sparsely populated for the explosions to pose much risk, Mr. Chuvilin said.

Reindeer herder communities had passed along tales of such eruptions before 2014, said Mr. Chuvilin, but Soviet and later Russian scientists had not documented any instances in earlier years. They have likely been rare occurrences until recently. Global warming is heating the Arctic faster than the rest of Earth.

“The permafrost is actually not very permanent, and it never was,” Mr. Chuvilin said.

Within a year or two of erupting, the craters fill with water and appear no more suspicious than small lakes.

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