Patomsky Crater

The Patomsky crater is a ring structure with a cone of crushed limestone blocks on the slope of a mountain of the Patom highlands, in the Bodaybinsky district of Irkutsk Oblast. It was discovered in 1949 by geologist Vadim Kolpakov, who called the object a 'shot'; locals call it the 'Nest of the Fire Eagle', and it is also known as the Kolpakov Cone and the Dzhebulda crater. Science has taken the riddle seriously: the cone formed about five hundred years ago, stands about forty metres high, is seventy-six metres across the crest, with a volume of 230–250 thousand cubic metres and a mass of about a million tonnes. The structure is clearly zonal: an outer slope, a ring rampart, a ring moat and a central mound twelve metres high; larches grow on the old inner rampart, none on the young outer one. Expeditions of 1963 and the 2000s (initiated by the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper) left no room for alien versions: the crater is the result of geological processes, though the exact mechanism is still debated. Reaching it is an expedition of its own: a helicopter from Bodaybo or a multi-day route through the taiga, and the season is short.