Study Helps Explain Natural Methane Explosions In Siberia: They're Driven By Global Warming And Limited By Geology
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Helge Hellevang, an environmental geoscientist at the University of Oslo and lead author on the new study, said he first got interested in the craters, on the Yamal and Gyda peninsulas, after watching a short BBC documentary about them. “We immediately wanted to understand how these could form,” Dr. Hellevang said. His team examined the literature, he said, but none of the published research on the craters gave a satisfactory explanation of why the craters formed on the two northern peninsulas and not in the “vast areas of permafrost elsewhere in the Arctic.”
So Dr. Hellevang and his colleagues decided to take a closer look at the data. They started with a review of published observations in English and Russian. Based on that review, the team created its own computer models for the origin of the explosions. This part of Siberia is known for its large deposits of natural gas. But Dr. Hellevang and his colleagues noticed that the Yamal and Gyda peninsulas also had signs of permafrost thinning related to faulting, essentially splits in the underlying rock caused by tectonic activity in the area. He suspected that the faults played a role in the formation of the gas craters.
According to the team’s computer models, the conditions for an explosion start to form when gas moves up through faults into a cavity under the permafrost that’s solid enough to prevent most of the gas from leaking into the atmosphere. When higher temperatures thaw that permafrost, forming shallow lakes at ground level, the seal is weakened.
At the same time, pressure inside the cavity increases as higher temperatures release gas trapped under the ice, which combines with over-pressurized gas coming from faults deep below. If the pressure in the cavity gets too strong, according to the models, the whole thing can go off in a giant blast. And sometimes, it does.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/climate/siberia-craters-exploding-permafrost-tundra.html