A megaslump in Siberia has been frozen for around 650,000 years, making it the second-oldest permafrost ever found and the oldest permafrost across Siberia.
Batagay Megaslump
According to Live Science, permafrost is ground that has remained permanently frozen for two years or more. Looking into permafrost may shed light on the past and even the future by knowing how the ground responded to prior events of climate change.
Scientists collected samples at the Batagay megaslump, which is a large collapsed area on the hillside by the Yana Uplands of northern Yakutia, Russia. Locals know the area as the "gateway to the underworld."
Paleoclimatologist Thomas Opel from Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute explains that the megaslump is a "stark badlands" situated amidst woodlands of larch and birch. Deforestation that began in the 1940s facilitated erosion, which then led to heightened seasonal melting of permafrost in the region. The permafrost in the specific region is roughly 80% ice. Hence, the significant melting caused hillside sediments to collapse.
As the years passed, the Batagay slump grew to cover a span of 0.8 square kilometers, India Today reports. This makes it the largest megaslump on the planet. Its headwall also goes as high as 180 feet.
Opel explains that Batagay is important because the sediments hold a long record of ancient climates and environments.
Such findings were reported in 2021 in the Quaternary Research journal. However, just last April, the researchers presented their latest findings.
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650,000-year-old Permafrost
To date the different permafrost layers, the researchers made use of three different techniques. The first one was radiocarbon dating, which gauges the carbon-14 isotope decay as time passes. This offers a clear picture that stretches back roughly 60,000 years.
The researchers employed other methods to take them further. One of these was chlorine-36 dating, which makes use of a molecular variation in the decay of chlorine in ice to pinpoint time. The other one, luminescence dating, made use of photon energy kept within mineral crystals buried beneath the ground. When such energy is expelled, it may shed light on how long it was before the sediments met sunlight. Such methods can help date materials that go as far back as 500,000 years or even 1 million years.
Based on measurements, the oldest layers of accessible permafrost were laid down around 650,000 years ago. Live Science notes that there was a gap in the record until roughly 200,000 years ago. They also found another gap roughly 130,000 years ago, which was a warm interglacial period on the planet.
Live Science adds that examining the permafrost from before and after this specific period could shed light on present-day climate change. Opel adds that they hope to predict how such permafrost could react or adapt to future climate change.
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