Climate Craziness of the Week: Crater in Yamal caused by 'global warming'

Yamal_craterI kid you not. The level of stupid here is unprecedented. Forget the UFO theories, or the fact that it is Yamal, which started Climategate through the distortion of tree ring data and the witholding of FOI requests on the issue, or forget that Yamal is roughly translated as ‘End of The World’, no, forget all those. This statement from a supposed scientist takes climate craziness to a whole new level. Video follows.

Anna Kurchatova from the Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Centre, thinks the crater was formed by a mixture of water, salt and gas igniting an underground explosion, a result of global warming.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-2693105/Giant-hole-appears-Siberia-Huge-crater-emerges-end-world.html#ixzz37ZUw0oYg

h/t to WUWT contributor, John Goetz

The climate data they don't want you to find — free, to your inbox.
Join readers who get 5–8 new articles daily — no algorithms, no shadow bans.
0 0 votes
Article Rating
159 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
noaaprogrammer
July 15, 2014 5:56 pm

MattS says:
I think it’s just a bore hole that someone took up close video of and spliced on the helicopter sound track..
If you look closely at the slo-mo part of the tape you can see the shadow of the helicopter.

george e. conant
July 15, 2014 5:59 pm

looks pretty big to me, interesting waterfalls running through ejecta debris , looks like one of those war of the worlds machines crawled out….

Sleepalot
July 15, 2014 6:01 pm

My guess is it’s PR for the new Godzilla movie.

July 15, 2014 6:03 pm

Willhelm says:
July 15, 2014 at 5:45 pm
My God!
What is the matter with you people?
It is obvious that this was caused by giant ants.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No way! Ants leave a mound, no hole in the middle. If it was a giant anything, it was a rabbit. He was supposed to make a left at Albuquerque.

Dudley Horscroft
July 15, 2014 6:06 pm

There used to be a theory that the moon was made of green cheese. Now we have proof that the earth is made of Swiss cheese.
I was told that in Auckland a developer wanted to build a tower block of offices on Queen St (main road in the CBD). After clearing the one storey building off the site, he had a drilling outfit test the subsoil. They drilled, and at 13 ft they broke through into a small cavern. When they got down 600 ft without reaching bottom they gave up. The high rise was not built.
Definitely Swiss Cheese..

July 15, 2014 6:10 pm

In USA, explosion causes giant hole.
In Russia, giant hole explodes you!

July 15, 2014 6:10 pm

Gary,
Wait…if…..where the crap is that gopher NOW? :-0

kadaka (KD Knoebel)
July 15, 2014 6:13 pm

OMG! They blew up The Most Influential Tree In The World!
Wow. I had heard Mann was dead set on keeping people from finding out the truth about his work, but who would have guessed he’d kill a tree to keep it from talking?
Farewell, poor YAD06. All you wanted was to be a good tree and grow the best you could in difficult conditions. Then they forced you to lie, then you had to die. Death by global warming, indeed. Sadness.

Louis Hooffstetter
July 15, 2014 6:45 pm

‘We can definitely say that it is not a meteorite,’
Based on what? It certainly looks like a low velocity impact crater to me. The rim appears to be raised tens of feet and the crater is surrounded by a ring of ejecta. If the diameter of the crater is ~275′, the ejecta halo is at least 100′ wide. It looks like a classic (albeit relatively small) impact feature.
It could possibly be the result of a subterranean gas explosion, but the video shows no evidence of gas bubbles in the crater lake. I find it hard to believe the gas has completely vented. The ‘Doorway to Hell’ in Turkmenistan was drilled in 1971 and is still burning:

Also, for there to be an explosion, there would have to be an ignition source. Any ideas? At this point, an impact seems much more plausible than a subterranean explosion.

ossqss
July 15, 2014 7:13 pm

So, from a seismic stand point, we should be able to ID the exact time this event happened in that spot, no?
Last thing we need are sandworms 🙂

George
July 15, 2014 7:26 pm

That is a roof collapse over a wet cavern. A sinkhole that the plug fell in, and then the ejecta as the water at the bottom shot out of the cavern as it was displaced. That also explains the wash back in and the streaking on the cavern walls.

g3ellis
July 15, 2014 7:28 pm

PS – at :01 to :03, you can see what may be where the rest of the water washed from the hole as it was ejected. There looks like a stream of silt at “7 o’clock” on the ejected rim out into the field just as they zoom in.

Wun Hung Lo
July 15, 2014 7:30 pm

“Anna Kurchatova from the Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Centre, thinks the crater
was formed by a mixture of water, salt and gas igniting an underground explosion”
But for such an exothermic reaction the fuel source needs an oxidizing agent,
and so where did that come from ? How come the billions of Methane Gas
reservoirs worldwide don’t explode ? It is for the same reason, lack of an
oxidizing agent. The whole sorry story is baloney.
If this is an example of the scientific “knowledge” of a graduate of
Tyumen State Oil and Gas University , then their degrees are worthless
as the macerated dead tree remains they are printed upon.

Mike McMillan
July 15, 2014 7:36 pm

Crop circles.

deebodk
July 15, 2014 7:37 pm

If you take a look at the entire region from above it has more holes than Swiss cheese.

Wun Hung Lo
July 15, 2014 7:41 pm

The Many Thousands of Similar Holes in The Yamal
http://goo.gl/maps/tEunP – satellite view
What kind of scientists thinks that one hole is so special among these ?

July 15, 2014 7:51 pm

It’s a pingo sinkhole:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingo
Yamal is part of Siberia that was covered by a truly gigantic freshwater lake during the last ice age due to the glaciation damming the Ob and Yenisei river systems, which are supposed to have flowed backward for some time:
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/lake.html
At the bottom of the crater is running water. This is a pretty standard sinkhole caused by an underground river. The dark layers on the sides are permafrost. The crater-like appearance is probably because it occurred within a pingo formation, which are associated with subterranean water and permafrost.
Don’t thank me – thank my science teachers, most particularly my 8th grade homeroom teacher who loved geology, taught us some research skills, and set our minds free to examine the world we see around us without resorting to theories about witches, UFOs, or paranormal X-men climate disruptors. Here’s to you, Mr. Brennan.

Jim Clarke
July 15, 2014 7:55 pm

Okay…one more argument. If the material surrounding the hole was deposited from an ejection, it would have at least some of the darker rock that makes up the sloped rim around the cavern. In fact, this dark rock makes up the majority of the layer from the surface to the top of the gaping, cavernous hole. If this scene is the result of a subterranean explosion or a meteor impact, much of what appears to be ejecta would be dark rock. But there is absolutely no dark rock in the so-called ‘ejected’ area.
This is because nothing was ejected. The lighter material is undoubtedly made up of the near surface layers and is likely sitting in the same place as it has for hundreds of thousands of years, but the soil that covered it has been washed away. The lighter material in the video is actually below the vegetation covered plain. All of the dark rock that used to span the hole is now at the bottom of the cavern.
It is a massive sinkhole and it ate a lot of water.

Jim Clarke
July 15, 2014 8:04 pm

g3ellis says:
July 15, 2014 at 7:28 pm
“PS – at :01 to :03, you can see what may be where the rest of the water washed from the hole as it was ejected. There looks like a stream of silt at “7 o’clock” on the ejected rim out into the field just as they zoom in.”
Sorry, but the stream that created that trail of silt was (is) flowing into the hole, not away from it.
This argument remains me of one of my favorite expressions:
“From here on up it’s all downhill!”

Jeremy
July 15, 2014 8:25 pm

Looks like a mud volcano.
Gas gets trapped in substrata and pressure builds up.
Every once in a while the gas breaks the seal or cap and vents to surface through a natural fracture in the rock above caused by the pressure below.
This makes a small volcano while the gas freely vents spurting out mud and gas like a geiser.
Eventually the gas pressure drops to atmospheric pressure and then the ground subsides (a sink hole occurs) as the porous once gas bearing strata are no longer able to support the soil above.
Nothing uncommon or unusual about this at all.
Good place to look for oil & gas though but the Russians already know that.

ggm
July 15, 2014 8:59 pm

If you look at Google maps satellite view of the Yamal area in Russia (just google Yamal), and then zoom in, you will see huge areas (hundreds of kms) with thousands of small round lakes. The whole area is pockmarked with them – thousands of them. This is just a new one forming. And considering the area is known to be permafrosted and it also has huge gas reserves (the Yamal project will be one of the largest gas projects in the world) – then it is quite conceivable that this was an underground gas/methane explosion, or more likely an outgassing or “burp” of some kind – especially when you look at the Google satellite view, it becomes obvious that the whole area has been doing this for a very very long time.

July 15, 2014 9:02 pm

I doubt that an explosive gas mix would have the energy density to cause this feature. Not possible to speculate about origins without more info.

Mike Wryley
July 15, 2014 9:06 pm

It’s the insertion point for the enema tube, heretofore alleged to be somewhere in New Jersey.

noaaprogrammer
July 15, 2014 9:23 pm

The bottomless pit of Revelation 20.

July 15, 2014 10:06 pm

Whatever it is, it’s a pretty common feature. I tried to copy and paste a photo, but apparently I can’t do that on this site. If you go to these coordinates, you can see hundreds of those circular crater-like features. 69.32.54N 70.15.19E
Pure speculation, but I think it’s something common: ice freezing, bulging up the earth, then melting in the summer to leave a crater with a central lake. Either that, or this is a glacially-smoothed karst, with thousands of sinkholes. I don’t think it’s the latter. If you use Google Earth and zoom around the northern terrain, you can see similar features just about anywhere above 65N.