Well! It was nice knowing yinz, because Doomsday is upon us. According to Scripture, the first two signs of the apocalypse are:
1. A goblin of the underworld shalt sign a princess with a voice of gold to his record label, and so the two will beget a heavily Auto-Tuned music video starring a mythical beast.
2. And lo! For a chasm shalt suddenly appear at the End of the World.
We’re two for two! Tuesday, The Siberian Times reported that a massive hole measuring 262 feet in diameter suddenly appeared in the Yamal region of Siberia. Gee, what does Yamal mean in the language of the Nenets, the region’s indigenous people? “The end of the world.”
Oh. (We’ll just wait for you to send the hearts-for-eyes emoji to all of your loved ones.)
Back to business! What — aside from the work of the devil — could have possibly caused this gaping maw to appear? From The Siberian Times:
Anna Kurchatova from Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Centre thinks the crater was formed by a water, salt and gas mixture igniting an underground explosion, the result of global warming. She postulates that gas accumulated in ice mixed with sand beneath the surface, and that this was mixed with salt – some 10,000 years ago this area was a sea.
Global warming, causing an ‘alarming’ melt in the permafrost, released gas causing an effect like the popping of a Champagne bottle cork, she suggests.
Given the gas pipelines in this region such a happening is potentially dangerous.
There are a lot of alarming things happening in this excerpt, but let’s focus on the most terrifying: Global warming could be causing enormous chunks of the Earth to pop like champagne bottles.
There’s also the tiny matter that this hole has appeared roughly 20 miles away from the Bovanenkovo gas field, the largest in the Yamal region. The Yamal peninsula itself is a crucial component of Russia’s oil and natural gas production, which makes up approximately half of the national income. Last spring, Russia’s oil and gas giant Gazprom first started fracking on the peninsula.
Now, I’m not a religious gal, but if a giant abyss appears near a fracking site on a massive gas reserve, maybe — MAYBE! Just a suggestion! — it’s a sign that there’s something going on there that is not entirely advisable. In the meantime, you can find me programming Google Alerts for Paris Hilton’s musical career and quietly building my storm shelter.
