A large expedition to the famous Patomsky crater, located in the Bodaibo region, which is a large cone-shaped mountain with a cut off top, in an impassable taiga about 200 kilometers from Bodaibo, has been completed
As one of the expedition members, representing Irkutsk State University, Dmitry Semenov, told "Baikal Info", during the week the scientists carried out all kinds of geometric measurements, topographic surveys, checked the natural object using the electrical prospecting method.
This was the fourth expedition of scientists to the mysterious crater. This time, scientists from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute, the Institute of Geology and Geochemistry of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Research Institute of Geochemistry of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, representatives of the Metropol group of companies, the Fund for Assistance to the Preservation of Lake Baikal, as well as Chairman of the Federation Council of the Russian Federation Sergey Mironov took part in it, formerly a geophysicist.
The results of the research will be ready only in two months, but already now we can say with certainty that the occurrence of a unique natural phenomenon is not associated with the fall of a meteorite. This hypothesis was rejected by scientists for a number of reasons - the crater does not look like a funnel, which is usually formed by falling meteorites, the meteorite body itself was not found. Perhaps the crater is a "young" volcano, but no volcanic processes occur in the earth's rocks within a radius of thousands of kilometers … Another hypothesis links the occurrence of the Patomsky crater with an underground explosion of natural gas.
In any case, according to the conclusions of geologists, this is a very young crater, its age is only a few hundred years, and according to some sources - less than a hundred years. Scientists do not yet know what exactly caused the carbonate rocks from which the crater was formed to rise to the surface of the earth and form such a cone-shaped shape. Suddenly the same phenomenon can happen again, and, for example, somewhere in another, more populated place, therefore it is so important for scientists to find out all the reasons for this phenomenon, to find out what predicted it, Dmitry Semenov emphasized.