Patomsky crater is located in the Bodaibo region in the north of the Irkutsk region. It was discovered in 1951 by geologist Vladimir Kolpakov, and is still one of the most mysterious natural objects. It is unclear how the crater, which looks like a volcano, but does not contain any traces of erupted deep rocks, appeared on the surface of the earth, and how it happened that this formation has no analogues in the world.
Tomichi enthusiasts
Oddly enough, but the "Nest of the Mountain Eagle", as the locals call the crater, has practically not been studied for a long time, and therefore versions and assumptions about its origin are extremely contradictory.
According to Tomsk Vestnik, the first unofficial expedition of students-enthusiasts to the crater was undertaken in July 1963.
One of its participants, Lev Oshchepkov, recalls: “How hard we walked! I had to carry a lot of equipment on myself - microscopes, magnetometers, pipes, theodolites, batteries, provisions … Everyone was completely exhausted. On the way, we bought horses and a "semi-dry" guide, on whom we had to spend strategic reserves of alcohol. On the third day of continuous exhausting crossings through stormy rivers and attempts to storm mountain steeps, even loaded horses began to fall off their feet. In addition, during one of the nights our radio technician almost whipped his leg with an ax."
Fortunately, everything worked out, and the researchers did not have to go back with nothing. Having reached the cherished place, the Tomsk residents immediately set to work: they examined the crater with a metal detector; collected rock samples, conducted magnetic, geodetic, radioactive, metallometric surveys over an area of four square kilometers. They dug an almost two-meter hole on the crater … But, alas, they did not manage to find anything unusual on the surface and at a depth of up to three meters. And the collected data turned out to be insufficient to give preference to meteorite, mechanical or volcanic hypotheses of the origin of the Patomsky crater.
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Traces of the Tunguska explosion?
The next, now official expedition was undertaken only many years later. One of its participants, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences PGO "Aerogeology" A. M. Portnov suggested that the Patomsky crater is a trace … of the Tunguska meteorite. This version appeared as follows: “In 1990, a hunter-fisherman V. I. Voronov discovered another huge felling of the forest (in addition to the Tunguska one). More precisely, he managed to establish the location of the forest fellout, discovered back in 1911 by an employee of the Omsk Road Administration, engineer Vyacheslav Shishkov, who was later a famous writer, author of the novel "Gloomy River". But V. I. Voronov found not only this. About 100 km northwest of the Tunguska zone, the hunter discovered a huge crater 200 m in diameter, densely overgrown with pine forest. The height of the crater sides above the ground is 1520 m."
So, if you draw a straight axis from the supposed place of the fall of the Tunguska meteorite to the northwest, then the fellout of the forest, found once by Shishkov and re-discovered by Voronov, and the two-hundred-meter Voronov crater, and after 700 kilometers to the same the notorious Patomsky crater neatly lies along the line.
However, recent expeditions have shown that the version that the Patomsky crater is a consequence of the Tunguska explosion does not justify itself. The fact is that larch trees were found on the slopes of the crater, which appeared one hundred to one hundred and fifty years earlier than the fall of the Tunguska meteorite.
But the same larch trees have posed a new riddle. The annual rings of some of them were growing intensively for almost 40 years, and then this process stopped for some time. Scientists observed a similar picture in Chernobyl and in Semipalatinsk, in the nuclear test zone. It turns out that there was a burst of radiation in the Patomsky crater? It turned out that it was so.
The participants of the last expedition found out the following: in 1845, a five-fold increase in the radioactive isotope in the wood occurred on the territory of the crater, which lasted for several decades, then all this went to the background level. The reasons for the increased background radiation at a time when there could be no talk of any nuclear research are still not clear.
Alien ship?
Another "cosmic" and, at first glance, the most fantastic version of the origin of the Patomsky crater was put forward by specialists from the Moscow Institute for Problems in Mechanics (IPM) RAS. After conducting laboratory experiments, they suggested that the cause of the anomaly was a body that fell from the sky. But not a meteorite, but some kind of super-strong cylindrical object.
Precisely cylindrical, since a spherical object could not penetrate so far into the depths, as a result of which such a huge (almost half a million tons) amount of rock was literally "squeezed out" to the surface. At a certain depth, the object stopped, reaching an underground cavity filled with gas under high pressure - the existence of such lenses is known to geologists. The gas, like a piston, slowly pushed the rock crushed by the object to the surface.
What kind of cylindrical object it was, mechanical scientists cannot yet explain: “Since the Patomsky crater,” they say, is a unique phenomenon, it is logical to assume that the impactor object that caused its formation also arose due to some exceptional reasons … However, the very fact of the formation of such a body somewhere in the Universe or within the Solar system does not cause any special contradictions in science."
According to scientists, the approximate length of the object is 6-16 meters, the diameter of the cylinder base is about three meters. After the fall, there was no explosion - this is evidenced by the shape of the crater. Pieces of rock are not chaotically scattered over a huge territory, but carefully, probably very slowly, squeezed out of the bowels. Apparently, the body is located at a depth of 100-300 meters, and it is possible to reach it.
Sounds extremely attractive to all fans of the "alien" version of the origin of the crater. I just want to dig deeper and find, finally, … what? Cylindrical body - alien spaceship?
Konstantin Fedorov
