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.

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Locations: Russia, Batagay, Canada, China, Tibetan, Alaska