I 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.
h/t to WUWT contributor, John Goetz
Jim Clarke says:
“Here’s my theory. There was no explosion. It’s a sinkhole. Based on the evidence in the video there’s not enough material around the hole to indicate an explosion. Instead it looks like a deposit of debris from water flowing into the hole. I think the sink hole formed under a large shallow lake and the water flowing into the whole washed it clean. It looks like a natural cavern in the bottom of the sink-hole. It is difficult to tell the size, but there could be a massive underground cavern complex there. If we knew the exact coordinates of the hole we could google earth it and see if there was a lake there before.”
Deposit of debris sounds credible. If it was an explosion or collision, there would be smaller ejecta further out. Does not seem to be the case.
Noting the erosion markes, this feature has been around for a long time. Much of this regions spends most of the year buried under snow and ice.
Maybe the “global warming” angle on this is that it’s a natural drain hole into an underground cavern that has been eroding for centuries but which has only recently been exposed.
This peninsula is about the size of Ireland. but with minimal human presence. You would never even notice the feature from the ground unless you were on top of it. Maybe it’s been exposed for decades but no one ever flew over it in a helicopter before.
“Enormous crater appears suddenly in part of Russia ”
The idea that this “suddenly” appeared is spurious.
The Russians are looking into it…..
@somersetsteve
So is everyone viewing the video apparently. 😉
Not unlike ‘sink holes’ on the dark side of the moon…
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/12jul_rabbithole/
Is there any cheese with this one?
Easy
That landscape is dotted with sinkholes most if not all filled with water. It is easy to see from the footage there is a large cavern underground. Most of the missing rock layer fell into that cavern which contained a large volume water. The displaced water then neatened up that hole as it shot out of the cavern and came back in after the event. It would have looked like mud bubble bursting in a hot mud pool rather than a explosion hence the slow velocity of the ejecta . It also appears there are mud waterfalls falling into the cavern.
It will fill with water then look like all the other sinkholes of that size in the area.
MaxedOutMama says: “It’s a pingo sinkhole.”
I think we have a winner!
1. the footage looks completely fake. The types of rock present do not make sense. The dark area looks like volcanic ash, the light area looks like volcanic tuff. Yamal is built on sedimentary sequences.
2. methane is only explosive in the range 5-15% in air
3. salt (the kind she is talking about) is not explosive and is a complete red herring. Nor is water explosive.
4. there are three things required for a gas explosion: fuel, ignition source, and oxygen. Two would have been missing.
If this person claims to be a scientist, I’d be checking what area they qualified in. Probably one of the pseudo sciences.
“Experts say that the darkening around the inner rim of the crater indicates ‘severe burning’ which scorched its edges.”
Hmmm… Looks like shadow to me. But then, I’m no “expert”.
Anyone in the area see a silver guy on a flying surfboard? Just sayin’
And nobody noticed she was a tennis player.
Me thinks somebody is taking the mickey here.
Continually repeating what stupid said does not make one smarter than stupid.
it is manbearpig’s entrance to his home, silly.
“Leigh says:
July 16, 2014 at 3:52 am
And nobody noticed she was a tennis player.”
I think you mean Anna Kurnikova (Анна Ку́рникова ),
not Anna Kurchatova. Ms. Kurchatova is indeed a researcher.
There’s also http://mamboo.co/en/mb1204493028, listing
Anna Kurchatova 32 years, Gemini. Russian Federation, Nizhny Novgorod
not sure if they’re the same person.
Apparently other researchers are on their way now to see what’s going on (or away, whatever).
Jim Clarke says:
July 15, 2014 at 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!”
—-
Are looking at a different point Jim? It appears downhill in the two pics on the Daily Mail screen caps too. But I will say that the screen cap resolution is pretty bad. But maybe 15 frames into the video, you can see a bank that looks like it is flowing right to left, not into the hole. But it is hard to tell.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-2693105/Giant-hole-appears-Siberia-Huge-crater-emerges-end-world.html
“water, salt, and gas”
One key ingredient missing. Oxygen.
Teams of scientists are rushing east to fathom the cause of this unusual – and rare – geographical occurrence
Wait, wait, wait… you’re telling me it’s both unusual and rare? Well, I can certainly see why the Super Scientician Go Team was called in to investigate…
I tried to find out the average depths of the lakes in Yamal to no avail, but their descriptions would indicate that most of them are very shallow, forming on the surface of the tundra. This is obviously something very different. The hole goes well below the tundra and through several layers of sedimentary deposits into an huge cavern. The erosion marks indicate that it has already sucked in a lot of water, but there are no signs of it ‘filling up’. Granted, the video sucks, but there is no developing lake visible in the depths. The water has gone elsewhere.
If it ever fills up, it will not be at all like a shallow Yamal lake, but like a blue hole, similar to this one in Belize:
http://belizescuba.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Belize-Blue-Hole.jpg
I am still hoping for a new and exciting underground cavern system.
noaaprogrammer says:
July 15, 2014 at 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.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Not at all difficult to fake in scale.
It bears an odd resemblance to the Kimberley diamond mine in South Africa.
My first thought was it was an anchor pull out from a radio tower guy line. The erosion around the hole seems to point to the hole being there for some period of time. Maybe it is a bomb crater left by Curtis LeMay in 1962 demonstrating to the Russians the United States could bomb the USSR with impunity during the Cuban Missile Crises.
The flammability range of methane is ~5% to ~15% in AIR. So underground you have to mix methane and air and find an ignition source. Quite a mixing job unless you have an existing underground cavern with an ignition source.
It looks like an initial upheaval with fairly low energy for the amount of earth moved. As in, just enough to push it up and out, a burp. After that, a sink hole formed from the new chasm and caused most of the internal structure including the steep, artificial looking center hole.
Who cares how it formed, guys? Now we have somewhere to put the IPCC, Greenpeace, WWF, FoE, et al! 😉 Seriously it would be very interesting to know how it formed, from an engineering & geological viewpoint!
No question about it, this is a hole made by something coming down straight, big, and very fast. Looks classically like meteorite impact…
A couple of people have mentioned this, but this looks like a common feature in this area.
https://www.google.com/maps/@69.2849362,70.6613638,61144m/data=!3m1!1e3
It’s probablly a Pellucidarian exploration bore hole.
It’s obviously a geo-vortex tectonian plasmionic surge hole produced by a magneflux field pulse triggered by an intersected quasi atompospheric/subteranian alignment.
That is all.
I’d gladly take look at it for further study if a few of you will send me some research funding.
The chemistry should be elucidated. There is little reason for there to be much oxygen available below the surface for such an explosion. I’ve seen methane being lit at surface when you stomp on a bog in northern Canada and have a lighter handy to light it – a puff of flame then it goes out. I’m not sure you would get methane development in the presence of a surplus of oxygen.