Even the roads are buckling, cracking and collapsing, as if in a slow-motion earthquake.
And outside a small town called Batagay, deep in the Siberian hinterland, a crater is rapidly opening up — known to locals as the gateway to the underworld.
Already more than half a mile deep and about 3,000 feet wide, the Batagaika crater is growing as the ground beneath it melts.
The land is belching up the past and swallowing the present — creating a yawning hole even more dizzying than the huge open-pit mines that already scar the Siberian landscape.
In Alaska houses in rural villages are sinking into the ground as the shoreline falls into the sea.
Locations:
Russia, Batagay, Canada, China, Tibetan, Alaska