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Folks, please chip in to my Paypal account at Darksydothemoon-at-aol-com if you can. I wouldn’t ask if I had any other options. A second hole in warming Siberian permafrost has been reported in the same remote, icy wilderness where a larger one was found last week. Geologists are still unsure how these features are forming, but some consensus is developing around a subterranean explosion of natural gas and salty water triggered by climate change:

Moscow Times — Reindeer herders in Russia’s Far North have discovered yet another mysterious giant hole about 30 kilometers away from a similar one found days earlier. Located in the permafrost of the subarctic Siberian region of Yamal, which means “end of the earth” in the local Nenets language, both craters appear to have been formed in recent years and have icy lakes at their bases. Scientists who examined the first hole theorized that it could have been created when a mixture of water, salt and gas exploded underground, the Siberian Times news site reported. The area, which has one of Russia’s richest deposits of natural gas, was covered by sea about 10,000 years ago, and vast salt deposits were left behind. “Global warming, causing an alarming melt in the ice under the soil, released gas causing an effect like the popping of a Champagne cork,” the news report said, citing an expert at the Subarctic Scientific Research Center.