For this year’s Halloween, we bring you an image from space of Siberia’s Batagaika Crater – dubbed the Gateway to Hell.
The image was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission on 10 July 2020 and processed using the imager’s near-infrared channels.
The local Yukatian people approach the area with caution. They report hearing ominous noises, leading some to calling it a portal to the underworld – or the Gateway to Hell.
However, rather than ghouls and ghosts – the reason for these reported noises is more geological in nature. Hiding Ice Age fossils and permafrost, this kilometre-wide crater is growing at an alarming rate of around 30 m a year. Scientists say that this rapid expansion began a few decades ago and is a result of ice in the crater is turning to water, which evaporates or melts and flows away so the residual sediments are no longer kept together by ice and subside.
Arguably scarier than Halloween, this thawing of permafrost and ice is because of climate change fuelled by increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.