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Patomskiy Crater

kamalktk

Antediluvian
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Feb 5, 2011
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http://siberiantimes.com/science/ca...what-created-this-mysterious-siberian-crater/

A rather long article with plenty of pictures, I will highlight this bit about the mystery crater:
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'When I first saw the crater I thought that I'd gone crazy because of the heat,' he noted. 'And indeed a perfectly shaped mount of a size of a 25-storey building with a chopped off top sitting in the middle of the woods was quite an unexpected discovery.

'From a distance it looked like a mine-shaft slagheap, only whitish. I even thought, 'Where are the people?' There were no labour camps in the area. Unless a very, very secret one?

'My second thought was an archaeological artifact. But the local Evenks and Yakuts, with my respect for them, are not the ancient Egyptians. They could not build stone pyramids, and didn't have any human resources nor the necessary scientific knowledge."

He ventured gingerly towards the strange shape, like no other anywhere nearby.

'I got closer and realised that the mysterious hill was not the work of a human', said Kolpakov. 'It rather looked like a perfectly round mouth of a volcano with a height of 70 metres. But volcanoes have not appeared on the border of Yakutia and Irkutsk region for several million years. And the crater was pretty fresh. It is located on the slope of a hill overgrown with larch.

'The trees still did not grow on the slopes and in the crater, the winds had not brought the soil yet. I estimated the age of this anomaly at some 200 to 250 years. And another mystery - a semi-circular dome cavity with a diameter of 15 meters in the centre of a crater. In volcanoes, even extinct, such domes cannot exist.'
 
kamalktk said:
Nice to have something new to chew over, rather than have to re-chew the tired and tasteless old Fortean topics yet again!

The thing does look familiar, although at the same time seems unique. I can offer no plausible explanation, but I will comment on one of the scientist's views.
But the nest's shape is not at all like other locations where meteorites were found. Another expert, a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, Igor Simonov, of Moscow Institute for Problems in Mechanics, conducted a series of intriguing experiments, and evidently established that the crater could have been formed from the fall of a cylindrical object of super dense material.
Tantalisingly, he said: 'On Earth this material is not available, but somewhere in space it may exist.'

Professor Simonov presented his work to his colleagues. And soon, a senior research fellow, Igor Yermolaev, from the Institute of Mechanics, held another series of experiments, and proved that the falling object could be not only the cylinder, but two bodies, one after another, the first flying at a speed of more than 6.5 km per second.
'When hitting the surface the first object exploded, creating a large crater,' said Igor Yermolaev, 'and the second slowed down presumably up to 1.5 km/s, because of the explosion and went into the ground.'

So two UFOs?

'Counting the fact that two meteorites cannot fly one after the other, hitting the same spot I cannot imagine the nature of this strange object. I do not know what it is.'
But research into asteroids and comets has shown that this is just what they do do!

Most asteroids are double bodies, and comets are loose agglomerations of many components. Impact craters on Earth (and elsewhere) often appear in pairs, so it doesn't seem totally impossible that two components could hit the same spot, one after the other.

The story might go like this: a two-part asteroid passes very close to Earth, within the Roche Limit - there tidal forces disrupt the body into its components, each of which sets off on its own individual orbit. At first the paths diverge, but both fragments are now trapped in Earth orbit, and begin to return to the original disruption point, but with a difference - as their paths converge, one body is now behind the other - it has a slightly longer orbital period. (A good illustation of this was given by Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which was broken up by Jupiter's gravity. The fragments lined up as I've described for the next pass, but there was no next pass - they all impacted on Jupiter.)

If a pair broken up by Earth this time hit the atmosphere of Earth next time, then a pair of meteors, one after the other, will streak through the sky. Now - even though the parts are on almost identical tracks - there are many reasons why they should not hit the same spot. Small explosions as they break up in the atmosphere can deflect their path; the earth's rotation will move the first impact site on before the second body hits, etc, etc. And sometimes these small deviations will cancel out and the bodies will impact close together, leaving the double craters already mentioned, and maybe once in a blue moon, both contributing to the same crater...
 
I considered the possibility that an energetic meteorite may have hit the ground hard enough to cause a small penetration of the crust, whereby a small amount of magma rose to form a plug.

Dunno if that idea applies...
 
Was there an article in FT about the Patomskiy Crater, at one time? I seem to feel it's been mentioned in the magazine...perhaps not.

A fascinating 'Devil's Crater', which (unless all factors are exaggerated or false, surely does seem to be a strange place)

 
I, too, thought the Patom / Kolpakov / Kolpakova / Patomskiy Crater had been discussed elsewhere in FT or on the FTMB.

The origin of this crater had been a complete mystery, particularly once the data seemed to confirm it wasn't an impact crater. The overall configuration of the crater (in the context of the rock substrate at the site) is difficult to reconcile with an impact from above.

There was a scientific conference in 2010 focused on this crater, where the attendees reached a consensus it was not of meteoric origin.

http://mysouth.su/2011/04/scientist...eteoritic-origin-patomskiy-crater-in-siberia/

More recently, two peer-reviewed articles have concluded the crater resulted from endogenic processes (i.e., sub-surface geological processes) - probably related to massive gas or steam explosions.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S1028334X11100187

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S0024490215060024
 
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