[Regulator75]

Meanwhile in Siberia.

http://www.perthnow.com.au/technolog...a48f7d3167ed1a

SIBERIA’s enormous ‘hellmouth’ crater in the melting permafrost is growing fast — and it’s opening a portal to a 200,000-year-old world.

The Batgaika crater, known to the local Yakutian people as the ‘doorway to the underworld’, is one of the largest of a growing number of pits collapsing across the Siberian landscape as the ice beneath the surface turns to slush — and methane gas.

But this crater in particular offers some form of silver lining.

It’s revealing eons of climate change in the region, along with long-buried animal carcasses and petrified forests.

The 1km wide, 85m deep crater is growing at the rate of 10m to 30m a year as the ice about its edges gives way. Researchers say it’s also getting gradually deeper.