Batagaika crater
Interesting facts
- Batagaika is the largest known permafrost crater in the world, and scientists often call it the Batagay megaslump.
- A 2021 study suggested that the deepest frozen layers exposed in the crater, around 650,000 years old, are the oldest permafrost yet known in Eurasia.
- In 2018 the crater yielded the complete frozen carcass of a foal of the extinct Lena horse, estimated at 30,000 to 40,000 years old.
- In 2024 an unusually complete carcass of a young mammoth, about one year old at death and dated to some 50,000 years ago, was recovered here.
- The forest that once shaded the slope was cleared during road-building near Batagay, which set off the thaw in the 1960s.
- By 2016 the slump had cut as deep as 73 metres below the original rolling surface of the hillside.
- Each collapse exposes fresh frozen ground to the air and speeds up the thaw, so the crater is expected to eat through the entire hillslope before it slows.
- According to 2024 estimates the crater grows by about a million cubic metres a year, roughly two-thirds of it ice, and its floor has nearly reached bedrock.
- The thawing walls release several thousand tonnes of carbon a year into the atmosphere.
Why it is worth it
The Batagaika crater is a wound in the Siberian taiga that keeps opening: a gash about a kilometre long and up to a hundred metres deep, its walls of grey frozen earth and pale ice collapsing a little further every summer. It is not an impact crater or a sinkhole in rock but a thaw slump, formed where the permanently frozen ground beneath the forest has begun to melt and slide away.
The collapse began in the 1960s, after the forest covering the slope was cleared; without the shade and insulation of the trees the ground warmed, the ice inside it melted, and meltwater and flooding carried the soil downhill. Since then the headwall has generally retreated by more than ten metres a year, and in some years by as much as thirty. By 2016 the depression covered more than 69 hectares, and over 25 million cubic metres of ice-rich ground had thawed. Its nickname in popular coverage, the "doorway to the underworld", says more about its look than its nature; the reality is a slope of forest tipping, year by year, into a raw amphitheatre of mud and ice.
For scientists the exposed walls are an archive. The layered sediments record somewhere between 200,000 and 650,000 years of climate history, and the thaw has released buried forest remains, ancient pollen and the carcasses of Ice Age animals, including musk ox, woolly mammoth and the extinct Lena horse. The same thaw also frees organic carbon that has been locked in the permafrost for millennia, which is why the slump is closely monitored as a measure of how northern ground responds to warming.
Getting there
The crater lies in the Verkhoyansky District of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), about 10 km south-east of Batagay, the district centre on the Yana River; it is named after the Batagayka, a tributary of the Yana. Batagay has its own airport (BQJ) with flights to Yakutsk, which lies about 660 km to the south.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Batagaika crater is a thermokarst depression in the Chersky Range area. The largest known permafrost crater in the world, it is within the Sakha Republic, Russia, in its Verkhoyansky District.
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