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Source: Global Science
Author: Winter Kite
1991年与2018年卫星图对比（图片来源：Victor Makarov and Aleksey Petrov via Murton et al, 2023）
The scary thing is what is released when the giant hole is created.
At first, judging from satellite images, a long and narrow "gap" appeared only vaguely on the highlands in the northern region of Yakuta in Russia. But over the next few decades, this "gap" became wider and wider, and then one end of the "gap" began to expand horizontally violently, gradually growing into a giant hole shaped like a "tadpole".
巨洞从1962年到2018年的变化（图片来源：Victor Makarov and Aleksey Petrov via Murton et al, 2023）
By 2023, the tadpole will be 1 kilometer long, 800 meters wide and 50 meters deep, and it will continue to "grow". In the process of its expansion, bones, teeth and even complete corpses of Pleistocene animals such as mammoths, as well as plant seeds and insect shells of different eras were found in the caves.
This mysterious cave is known by many names, some call it "Batagaika crater" (Batagaika is a nearby place name) or "gate to hell".
航拍图（图片来源：A. Gabyshev and A. Kizyakov via Murton et al, 2023）
Of course, it is not actually a crater created by a meteorite impact, scientists have given it the name "Batagay megaslump", which is a thaw slumping caused by the melting of permafrost. When the area of the hot melt landslide exceeds 20 hectares, it can be called a giant landslide, and the scale of the "Batagaika giant landslide" has reached 87.6 hectares in 2023, making it the largest thermal melt landslide in the world today.
巨洞与人（最下面那个红圈）的对比（图片来源：J. B. Murton via Murton et al, 2023）
And its formation and expansion narrate a catastrophe that is taking place on the planet.
The opening of the "Gates of Hell".
Let's start with the birth of the "Batagaika giant slide".
It was originally covered with a thick layer of permafrost. Permafrost refers to the ground (composed of rocks, soil, ice, organic matter, etc.) that has been maintained at or below 0°C for many years, and has been often translated as "permafrost". But then it turned out that these so-called "permafrost" are not permanent, because with climate change and other reasons, the permafrost in many parts of the world has begun to melt one after another, some slowly, some violently, and the "Batagaika giant landslide" is undoubtedly the most violent.
In the 40~50s of the last century, human logging and mining activities intensified in the area near Batagaika, destroying the vegetation of the taiga in the area, exposing the surface directly to solar radiation, and the temperature began to rise. Gradually, the permafrost on the surface began to melt, and the crushing of the mining truck's tracks exacerbated the process.
冻土融化后，出现的远古动物尸体（图片来源：G. N. Savvinov via Murton et al, 2023）
The thawing of this permafrost immediately began a terrible process that caused the ground structure to begin to become unstable and then begin to collapse. The water generated by the melt will continue to flow into the collapsed area, and the heat conduction and convection during the water flow will melt more of the ground ice and erode the soil sediments released by the ice melt, resulting in more local permafrost thaw and larger ground collapse. This terrible process is called thermokarst, and under such positive feedback, the permafrost melts and the ground collapses at an alarming rate.
Gradually, a narrow gully-like landscape called a gully was formed, which was only 800 metres long and 30 metres wide according to satellite imagery in 1962. However, as more permafrost melts, the gully gradually widens, and then exposes large chunks of ice-rich frozen soil underground, resulting in a further acceleration of thawing and a more unstable ground, resulting in larger-scale landslides and collapses, officially entering the "hot melt landslide" stage. At this stage, the landslide began to expand rapidly laterally, and the entire landscape gradually became more and more like a "tadpole".
扩增过程（Murton et al, 2023）
By the 90s of the last century, the scale of the landslide had exceeded 20 hectares, and it became a "giant landslide". Subsequently, it continued to expand, tripling in size between 1991 and 2018 alone. Today, it is more than 80 hectares in size, and recent observations of the ground ice structure and the rate of retreat of the slope crest suggest that the expansion of the "Batageka mega-slide" will continue for several years to decades.
The "Gates of Hell" are not in vain
In fact, both the cause of the "Batagaika Giant Slide" and its consequences deserve the name "Gates of Hell".
On the one hand, drastic permafrost thawing events such as the Batageka mega-slide show that our planet's climate is warming rapidly. What's even more frightening is that as the permafrost melts, more greenhouse gases will be released, further exacerbating global warming and creating positive feedbacks.
Permafrost preserves large amounts of carbon-containing organic matter from different geological periods, and in the permafrost state, these organic matter "are like food in the refrigerator that can be stored for a long time without spoiling – until you thaw them and expose them to the decomposition of microorganisms." David Olefeldt, a scientist from Canada University of Alberta, said · Olefeldt.
Today's thawing of permafrost means that the carbon-containing organic matter is thawed, which is quickly broken down by microorganisms, and the carbon is released in the form of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, exacerbating climate change.
多年冻土中的有机碳以温室气体的形式释放（Schuur et al, 2023）
In a recent study published in Geomorphology, researchers calculated that 34.7 million cubic metres of permafrost had melted by 2023 during the Batageka mega-landslide, releasing 169,500 tonnes of organic carbon in the process, using detailed remote sensing data and modelling analysis. For some time to come, it will continue to release organic carbon at a rate of 4,000 to 5,000 tonnes per year.
The "Batageka mega-slide" is just one example of the melting of permafrost under the catastrophe of climate change. In addition to this, melting permafrost around the world is constantly releasing greenhouse gases. Previous studies have estimated that terrestrial soils in the northern hemisphere's permafrost zone store nearly 1.7 trillion tonnes of organic carbon, more than twice the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere. One can imagine what the hell would happen to our planet if all this carbon was released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.
In a 2022 study published in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Alfeldt and colleagues looked at the amount of carbon released from permafrost under different levels of warming. Even if global warming is slower, i.e. the temperature rises below 2 degrees Celsius, 55 billion tonnes of carbon will still be released in permafrost in the form of carbon dioxide and methane by the end of the century. And if nothing is done to slow climate warming, the Arctic region will release nearly five times that amount of carbon by the end of the century, and twice the carbon dioxide equivalent released by the United States since its industrial rise 150 years ago.
不同气候变化情景下本世纪末多年冻土中释放的温室气体含量，图中单位：十亿吨（图片来源：Center for Ecosystem Science and Society, Northern Arizona University）
"Even if we stop fossil fuel emissions by mid-century, the Arctic will continue to be affected for hundreds of years afterward." Alfeldt said.
Reference Links:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ppp.2194
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169555X24001338?via%3Dihub#preview-section-references
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-011847#right-ref-B3
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14338
https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2022/10/thawing-country-of-permafrost-likely-to-emit-as-much-greenhouse-gas-as-a-large-industrial-nation.html
https://www.businessinsider.com/giant-hole-siberia-visible-from-space-growing-satellite-images-permafrost-2024-8
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p08lmh4z/siberia-s-enormous-hole-in-the-ground-is-getting-bigger
https://eros.usgs.gov/earthshots/batagaika-crater-russia
https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/32795/