In deepest Siberia: the world’s largest thermokarst “tadpole”.

Not far (20 minutes on snowmobiles) from the 70-kilometer road between Verkhoyansk and Batagay, there’s a unique natural phenomenon that goes by the name of the Batagaika crater ->

Apparently it formed as a result of a combination of global warming and certain actions of Soviet Homo sapiens – those certain actions being cutting down the trees in the surrounding area, plus the making of ruts by heavy all-terrain vehicles (used during the deforestation). This eventually led to the permafrost thawing, becoming a ravine, and then spreading out, giving us today this here bizarre massive tadpole-shaped depressed formation on the Siberian plains:

And this is what it looks like from outer space:

Here’s a pic of the thermokarst depression in the summer:

(Photo from here)

From where I got that photo, I got some information too: the depression measures around a kilometer by a kilometer (the tadpole-head part – not including the tail), and is approximately a hundred meters deep. It’s gradually thawing out and subsiding, and in the thawed subsoil are revealed all kinds of ancient animal bones from eons ago – including mammoth tusks!

Not that we saw any bones; however, we were up real close to a set of bones – albeit wrapped-up. What?! Well, check this pic: what’s that on the back of the pickup? ->

…Actually, it’s the skull and some other bones of some kind of tundra-dwelling antelope that roamed these plains some 40,000 years ago. So – why were they on the back of our pickup? We were asked by some researchers to bring them back with us to Yakutsk. We of course obliged, and in doing so our “road trip” officially became an “expedition” with real scientific significance!

Close up:

And here’s us on its edge:

It’s a very strange place – spooky even. It’s like a kink in the fabric of the space-time continuum. And if it carries on at its current pace, one day it may eat up Batagay and then Verkhoyansk. And then what? After all, it’s not clear how to stop it. We (man) upset the natural delicate balance of the permafrost ecosystem, and now we’re paying the penalty – eerily not just by its slowly gobbling up the landscape here; Petrovich also paid a penalty – of a different kind: he set his brand-new drone off to go down and across the sunken-tadpole’s surface but… it never came back. All due to the man-made error in the space-time matrix, obviously :).

One brand-new drone down, it was back on the snowmobiles and back to our Tanks and onward – southward…

The rest of the photos from our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk road trip expedition are here.