The Batagaika crater, known as the ‘gateway to the underworld’ for its impressive size, is revealing secrets from the bowels of the Earth that tell of an era that occurred millions of years ago. The heavy and icy layers of ice that melt day by day in the ‘gateway to the underworld,’ have evidenced one of the oldest findings on the planet.
The ‘Gateway to the Underworld’ and the Collapse of Permafrost
Siberia is characterized by the harshness of its climate, which for most of the year, leaves the region submerged in sub-zero temperatures. This has been the case for millions of years since past ice ages allowed the sediment of mud and soil to freeze to form what we know today as permafrost. However, the current climate crisis and unusually high temperatures have been melting the frozen ground in the northernmost regions of the world.
Precisely this fact has led to the creation of the so-called ‘door to the underworld,’ a crater in Batagaika, Russia, the largest of its kind that is gradually exposing the bowels of the permafrost. Paradoxically, this fact is giving clues to researchers to discover what lies frozen there and thus reconstruct the past eras of our planet.
The crater depression is a rigid wasteland in the middle of larch and birch forests. The relentless deforestation that began in the 1940s gradually led to erosion, which in turn, caused further melting of the permafrost in the region where the lowest temperatures often reach -40ºC.
The main reason for the crater collapse is that the permafrost in this region is composed of 80% ice. Thus, any sudden and temporary variation in temperature will have consequences on the Batagaika slope. It currently reaches almost 1 square kilometer with a depth of 55 meters, making it the largest mega depression on Earth.
A Window into the Past
Because these layers have been frozen for millions of years, melting means that interesting data from the bowels of the earth are emerging. New research has concluded that it is the second oldest permafrost in the world, with an age of at least 650,000 years.
Batagay is important, said Thoma Opel, a paleoclimatologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, because its sediments preserve a long, albeit broken, record of the ancient environment and climate. So far, only one site is known to have permafrost older than that of Batagay, namely the Yukon in Canada, with permafrost just over 700,000 years old. Greenland, on the other hand, dates back 130,000 years.
To ascertain the age of the permafrost at the ‘gateway to the underworld,’ Opel and his team used three dating methods: carbon-14, chlorine-36, and luminescence dating. It was the latter that yielded that the deepest exposed layers in the Batagay permafrost are at least 650,000 years old.
“Given the fact that there is so much ancient carbon in the permafrost, we hope to be able to help a little bit in predicting how the permafrost might react to climate change in the future,” says Opel. And finally, he added that the oldest plant and animal remains found in the layers of the gateway to the underworld come from the last 60,000 years, but there are certainly more to be discovered, he concluded.
Story written in Spanish by Alejandra Martínez in Ecoosfera
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