The team arrives on Wednesday to survey the seemingly bottomless pit, located in one of Russia’s northernmost points, at a latitude closer to that of Greenland than Canada.

The hole is about 80 meters wide and apparently had some extreme thermal event contributing to its formation, according to scarce detail gleaned from video footage, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported.

It wasn’t until that footage started to make the rounds that the media and the scientific community woke up to the possibility of surveying its origins.

The crater is believed to have been formed two years ago. No one knows how.

The seriousness of the find is evidenced by Russia’s Emergencies Ministry being present among the expedition. The Russian Academy of Sciences is also on board, planning to take samples of the soil, air and water from the area, which is big enough to fit several MI-8 helicopters.

Yamal, the peninsula where the spooky hole is located, is far up in the northern-Russian steppes. The precise location of the crater is some 30km from the gas field of Bovanenkovo. The whole area is within Russia’s key strategic oil and gas region – the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

The 700km area is a huge stretch of ancient permafrost otherwise known for its variety of animal species and is renowned as an archaeological goldmine where wooly mammoth skeletons have been discovered.

While some of the more absurd theories about the hole’s origins have been readily dismissed – chief among them that it was caused by a UFO – others see a potential relationship with global warming, believing that salt and gas were mixed underground, causing a subterranean explosion.

The one thing everyone agrees on is that the soil found around the crater was thrown out of it.

When asked if it’s possible that the hole was caused by a meteorite, a spokesman for the Yamal branch of the Emergencies Ministry said “we can definitely say that it’s not a meteorite. No details yet.”

BA/BA