Pop Goes the Icy Lid 

The remote tundra of western Siberia looks like the planet has burst from beneath its own skin. 

Giant craters – some more than 150 feet deep and almost 100 feet wide – scar the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas, the result of explosive methane eruptions that have puzzled scientists for more than a decade. 

Now, new research has revealed what’s really happening beneath Siberia’s permafrost. 

In their study, lead author Helge Hellevang and his team found that these so-called gas-emission craters (GECs) form when heat and methane rise from gas reservoirs buried deep beneath the Siberian ground, traveling upward along fault lines until they hit frozen soil. 

These gases collect beneath the permafrost in pressurized pockets, sealed off by a thick, icy layer that acts like a cork in a bottle – until it finally gives way in a massive explosion that hurls debris hundreds of feet into the air and leaves behind steep, cylindrical voids. 

Hellevang and his colleagues reviewed both Russian and English-language studies on the craters and used computer models to simulate how they form, according to New Atlas. 

Their findings showed that the fault-riddled terrain allows deep gas to seep upward, accumulating in cavities just below the permafrost. When warming temperatures or nearby lakes thin the frozen seal, the trapped gas suddenly bursts through with explosive force. 

Since the first crater’s discovery in 2014, anywhere from eight to 20 have been identified across the two peninsulas. But these scars don’t last long.  

“These craters degrade quickly into lakes as they melt or fill with water, so it is possible that we have not noticed all of them forming before they degraded,” Lauren Schurmeier, a researcher at the University of Hawaii who has published a separate study on the phenomenon, told the New York Times. 

The new study also explores the role of climate change in forming these craters, according to the authors. 

Warming doesn’t directly cause the blasts but primes the landscape for them by thinning frozen ground along fault lines and creating weak spots above trapped gas. 

“This suggests that GECs can potentially also form elsewhere, but require connection to natural gas generation and accumulations below continuous permafrost,” the researchers wrote.