The Fire Eagle's Nest: What Built Siberia's Patomskiy Crater?
In 1949, geologist Vadim Kolpakov was mapping the remote taiga of Russia's Irkutsk region, some 200 kilometers north of the gold-mining town of Bodaibo, when he saw something impossible through the trees: a huge, pale gray mound rising out of the forested hillside. Nothing in his training explained it. The local Yakut hunters already had a name for the place — the Fire Eagle's Nest — and, by his account, considered it a bad spot best avoided.
The structure, now known as the Patomskiy crater, is a cone of shattered limestone blocks roughly 40 meters high and about 160 meters across at the base. At its top lies a ring-shaped crater, and at the center of the ring sits a rounded dome — a nest with an egg. Against the surrounding forest the gray mound looks strikingly fresh, and studies of the trees growing on its slopes suggest it is only a few centuries old: in geological terms, it appeared moments ago.
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