STRANGE LANDSCAPES
Kent’s grisly island of bones and Siberia’s peninsula of gigantic craters
DEADMAN’S ISLAND
A haunting wilderness on the north coast of Kent would be a fascinating if grisly destination for a day trip – but visitors are banned due to its being a recognised bird breeding and nesting site, designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest by its owner, Natural England. Deadman’s Island, just off the river Medway and opposite Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey, is littered with human remains, having been used as a burial ground for those who died aboard prison ships over 200 years ago. The ‘hulks’, as the vessels were called, were decommissioned naval warships used to house convicts awaiting transportation to Australia, and were immortalised by Charles Dickens, whose Great Expectations (1861) features an escapee from one such boat, Abel Magwitch.
Rising sea levels, coastal erosion, and lower tides have resulted in numerous rotting wooden coffins, skulls and bone fragments protruding from the six feet (2m) of mud that previously covered the area. Indeed, the island was once covered by the sea and is still a dangerous place to walk. A BBC team explored the site for an Inside Out South East programme, broadcast in 2017. Its director, Sam Supple, said of the island: “It is like being on the set of a horror film. It looks so surreal, it’s like an art department has designed it. There are open coffins and bones everywhere.” Presenter Natalie Graham added: “What I saw there will stay with me forever. This is a really strange sight. I would imagine there can’t be anywhere on Earth like this.”
The island is completely uninhabited, and has generated local folklore which warns of hounds with glaring red eyes who eat the heads of buried corpses. Open coffins and scattered human remains litter a river bank at the location known as ‘Coffin Bay’. Convicts on board the floating prisons who had died of cholera or other diseases were buried in unmarked graves on the island.
Similar human remains have also been discovered at nearby Chatham, where French prisoners were held during the Napoleonic wars; those who died were buried in nearby marshes. When their bones were revealed by erosion they were exhumed and reburied. It has been suggested that the’ remains on Deadman’s Island should be similarly reburied, but the treacherous terrain would make this difficult, with a constantly changing seascape often washing the convicts’ bones out to sea. kentlive.co.uk, 22 Aug 2020.
SIBERIAN CRATERS
A huge 50 metre- (164ft) deep crater has appeared in northwestern Siberia, having been discovered by an airborne TV crew on an unrelated assignment. The crater is believed to have been produced by a massive explosion, the result of a build-up of methane gas due to thawing permafrost in the tundra. The giant hole is the 17th such crater appearing over the last six years in the region, which has seen increased summer temperatures year on year.
After the film crew’s find, a group of scientists made an expedition to the Yamal Peninsula to examine the large cylindrical crater. Dr Evgeny Chuvilin of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology said it was “striking in its size and grandeur” and had been caused by “colossal forces of nature”. Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky of the Russian Oil and Gas Research Institute in Moscow said the hole was unusual. “It holds a lot of additional scientific information, which I am not yet ready to disclose,” he said cryptically. He explained that these craters appear after explosions in “gassaturated cavities… formed in the permafrost” and has also previously claimed that drilling for natural gas in the Yamal region may be a factor in the eruptions. He is also concerned about the risk of a disaster should a blast take place beneath a gas pipeline, industrial production facility or residential area.
Some of the explosions have occurred in swelling mounds or pingos in the tundra where the gas builds up under a thick cap of ice. “In a number of areas, pingos – as we see both from satellite data and with our own eyes during helicopter inspections – literally prop up gas pipes,” Prof Bogoyavlensky has said previously. “In some places they jack up the gas pipes… they seem to begin to slightly bend these pipes.”
Russian scientists call the craters hydrolaccoliths or bulgunnyakhs, but have warned that their study of the unusual phenomenon is still at an early stage, as it only became known six years ago. www.news.com.au, 31 Aug 2020.