The formation of a mysterious and massive crater in a remote Siberian peninsula triggered an explosion that was heard more than 100km (62 miles) away and caused the sky to glow. First discovered in 2013 by reindeer herders, its formation has become one of the biggest enigmas in the region. When it first formed, locals dubbed it the "end of the world" crater.
Bubbles of air trapped in ice long ago are helping paint a clearer picture of what may happen to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the future if climate change melts the northern hemisphere's permafrost, scientists say.The Mars rover Spirit’s entire five-year mission, in less than three minutes:
We'll not know what we had until it's gone.....
Rapid thaw of permafrost concerns climate experts
Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane - a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide - at a perilous rate.
Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.
"Here, total carbon storage is like all the rain forests of our planet put together," says the scientist, Sergey Zimov - "here" being the endless sweep of snow and ice stretching toward Siberia's gray horizon, as seen from Zimov's research facility nearly 350 kilometers (220 miles) above the Arctic Circle.
In 2003, the US General Accounting Office reported that 184 villages in Alaska are facing problems with flooding or erosion. One of those is called Shishmaref, situated about 20 miles south of the Arctic Circle. In the past, Shishmaref owed its existence to the permafrost, so that coastal erosion was firmly under control. Over the last 30 years, Alaska's average temperatures have gone up by four degrees. Now Shishmaref is in trouble. These facts were taken from Dana Lixenberg's The Last Days of Shishmaref, a portrait of the little village that is now slowly being eaten by the sea. The village is home to about 600 Inupiaq people, who are going to lose their homes.
In 2007, filmmaker Jan Louter invited the photographer to come along to Shishmaref. The result of the work can be seen in the form of a documentary film and as the book The Last Days of Shishmaref.
