Siberia's ‘Gateway To Hell' Is A Peek Into The Distant Past — And A Warning For Our Immediate Future
In the northeastern reaches of Siberia, near the town of Batagay, a strange and growing scar splits open the landscape. From satellite view, it resembles a dark, jagged tadpole burned into the forest.
On the ground, it's a massive thermokarst depression — technically a megaslump, often addressed as the 'Gateway to Hell.' Measuring over a kilometer long and up to 100 meters deep, the Batagaika Crater is the largest feature of its kind on Earth. And it continues to grow every year.
What began decades ago as a shallow dip in the land has become an accelerating collapse of ancient, ice-rich ground.
As it expands, Batagaika exposes a record of frozen history and a glimpse of what might lie ahead. It's a portal into the distant past, a permafrost time machine and a real-time indicator of climate disruption already underway.
In the 1960s, Soviet deforestation around the Chersky Range removed the forest canopy that had long insulated the frozen ground beneath. Without shade or cover, the permafrost began to absorb more solar radiation. Ice-rich soil warmed, thawed and collapsed, setting off a chain reaction still unfolding today.
This process, called thermokarst formation, creates self-reinforcing slumps. Thawing leads to erosion, which exposes more ice to melt, which deepens the collapse. What began as a modest dip in the terrain evolved into a gaping chasm.
By the 1980s, the crater had already expanded dramatically. Today, it's still growing, eating through forested hillslopes and releasing once-frozen soil and organic matter as it goes. The sheer volume of thawed ground is staggering, with the megaslump mobilizing a total volume of nearly 35 million cubic meters since its formation, according to a June 2024 study published in Geomorphology.
And once the earth has opened like this, there's no easy way to close it.
At first glance, it's a gash in the Earth — a scar from warming air and vanishing ice. But descend into the yawning mouth of the Batagaika Crater and you're stepping backward in time.
This mile-long megaslump, nicknamed the 'Doorway to the Underworld' by the Yakutian people, has become one of the world's richest windows into the past.
As the permafrost collapses, it unearths fossilized gold from tens of thousands of years ago. In 2024, locals pulled from its walls the astonishingly preserved body of a baby mammoth named Yana.
Her skin, ears and even eyelashes were still intact after 50,000 years entombed in ice.
The Batagaika Crater has also exposed forests buried for over 200,000 years, preserved pollen records and paleosols — ancient soils rich in chemical signatures — that scientists are using to reconstruct climate fluctuations going back to the last interglacial period.
Since its formation in the 1960s, the crater has continued to grow, and today it expands by as much as 30 meters per year. In 30 years, it has tripled in size, exposing deeper permafrost layers and releasing ancient carbon.
As the Earth warms, what lies frozen doesn't always stay that way. In 2016, a sudden outbreak of anthrax in the Yamal Peninsula — linked to the thawed carcass of an infected reindeer — left dozens ill and killed a child. That bacteria had been locked in permafrost for decades.
With permafrost thawing as it is, far older microbes may also be revived in the future. Already, 30,000-year-old viruses have been recovered in viable form — ones that, so far, only infect amoebas. But no one can say for certain what else might emerge.
Beyond the microbial unknowns, Batagaika's deepening gash is a direct contributor to the climate crisis. The permafrost beneath it holds thousands of tons of carbon and methane.
As the crater expands, those gases are released, amplifying warming and triggering further collapse — a feedback loop that scientists now view as one of the most urgent tipping points on the planet.
With each thawed layer, the Batagaika crater unveils relics of long-lost worlds while releasing forces that could reshape our own. In this gaping wound carved by climate and time, the Earth is speaking. The question is whether we're ready to listen.
Take the 10-question Climate Change Worry Scale now to see how your concerns compare to global trends—and discover what actions align with your climate mindset.
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