It has been called everything from the "gateway to the underworld" to a "tadpole-shaped gash." The Siberian crater is eating into the surrounding landscape "like a living thing," Treehugger said. This "immense fracture" in the depths of the Russian Far East "splintered open" just a few decades ago, said IFL Science. And with "climate change continuing to cook up this part of the world, the literal scar on the planet is continuing to grow."
The Batagay (also spelled Batagaika) crater, or megaslump, was first spotted on satellite images in 1991 after a section of hillside collapsed in Sakha, a republic in northern Russia. A megaslump is a vast, expanding depression in the Earth's surface. These "eerie sinkholes" are the result of melting permafrost, the frozen soil and rock that makes up the majority of the Arctic landscape, Treehugger explained. As our planet continues to warm, the permafrost thaws and the Earth "loosens and slumps."
The slump's expansion is "a sign of danger," Nikita Tananaev, the lead researcher at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, Russia, said to Reuters. The soil beneath the slump contains an "enormous quantity" of organic carbon that will release into the atmosphere as the permafrost thaws, further exacerbating the planet's warming.
But there is a positive side, too, Julian Murton, a professor of permafrost science at the University of Sussex, told Yahoo News. Layers of soil going back 200,000 years have been exposed by the collapse, and the scientific community hopes that studying the crater may offer fresh insights into climate change. | 
