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Flames rose at the Markovskoye condensate treatment unit in east Siberia At least seven people were injured at the blast in the Ust-Kut district at Angarsk It was in the same region as a blast 3 days earlier with the force of a 'plane crash' A new explosion and inferno has hit a strategic Russian oil and gas field amid suspicions key facilities are being targeted in sabotage attacks linked to Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine. Armageddon-like flames shot into the sky from the giant blaze at the Markovskoye condensate treatment unit in the biting minus 22C cold. Dramatic footage...

A key construction project of the China-Russia east-route natural gas pipeline was completed on Saturday. It will allow Russian gas to cross the Yangtze River to reach Shanghai, laying the foundation for the full completion of the landmark China-Russia energy cooperation project. The under-river tunnel across the Yangtze River, a key control project of the pipeline, was completed after 28 months of construction, according to PipeChina. The tunnel has a length of 10.226 kilometers and is designed with three natural gas pipelines with a diameter of 1,422 millimeters each, according to media reports. By adopting environmental protection measures such as...

Upon closer inspection, you would find that this is no random collection of bones, but rather is a deliberately constructed roadway delineated by the towering rib bones (some in excess of five metres high and weighing 300 kg), and dotted with huge whale skulls and large square pits dug into the permafrost. It would be a perplexing sight indeed.

For almost 50,000 years, viruses have been waiting, frozen in layers of permafrost that have thawed with the warming of Earth. A recent study of a section of Siberian permafrost by scientists from the French National Centre for Scientific Research found 13 viruses that have survived 48,500 years, according to Canada’s Global News. That’s older than the previous oldest virus found, which was 30,000 years old. One of the new finds has been dubbed a “zombie virus” by the New York Post. “One quarter of the Northern hemisphere is underlain by permanently frozen ground, referred to as permafrost. Due to...

Vladimir Putin's conscripts have been filmed drunkenly battering each other in an alcohol-fuelled brawl at a training barracks ahead of their deployment to the battlefields of Ukraine. An extraordinary leaked video shows the 'drunk' soldiers punching each other, with some ending up unconscious on the floor during the fight at the barracks in Yurga, Siberia. The video shows Putin's army intelligence and military police dragging the unconscious troops, who are from the 74th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, along the street and away from the bloody brawl. The footage tallies with reports of low morale and drunkenness among Russian recruits and...

Dozens of mobilised soldiers have staged an extraordinary mutiny telling how they have no respect for the authorities in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. A uniformed spokesman for the men is applauded by conscripts after he threatened the people should topple their rulers over the war in Ukraine. He berates an unseen commander or top official over the threats faced by conscripts called to war by the Kremlin dictator. The unnamed reservist mocks a policy in his region - the Tuva republic in Siberia - to gift a ram to each family of those mobilised. He says there are not enough walkie-talkies...

In little over a week, Russia lost its second fighter jet, Su-30, to an uncanny crash when it was carrying out a massive aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities and battling in the Kherson region. On October 23, an apartment building in Irkutsk, Siberia, was struck by a Russian Sukhoi Su-30SM Flanker multi-role fighter, killing both crew members and starting a massive fire on the ground. Su-30 is a two-seat, twin-engine, highly agile fighter aircraft produced by Sukhoi Aviation Corporation of Russia. The Su-30s are manufactured at the neighboring Irkutsk Aviation Plant, where the jet is reported to have just taken...

...He and his colleagues managed to extract DNA from 15 out of 17 pieces of bone or teeth recovered from the Chagyrskaya cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia, Russia. The DNA showed that some pieces came from the same individuals, so the findings represent 11 individuals in total, including several teenagers and children.Dating of sediments and bison bones at the site suggests the Neanderthals lived in the cave between 51,000 and 59,000 years ago, while the DNA shows that many of the individuals were related...Peter thinks it is possible that these individuals all died around the same time, but...

Mystery of the fat Venus The Dominion Post | Monday, 9 April 2007 WORLD OF SCIENCE - BOB BROCKIE We all know about those hand-sized Ice Age women carved in stone – those plump ladies with huge breasts and behinds, tiny heads, artful hairdos and no faces. They're known as Palaeolithic Venuses and they raise a lot of puzzling questions: How come these almost identical figurines were found all the way from France to Siberia? How come this stylised carving tradition was practised and passed down over 20,000 years? What purpose did they serve? There are as many answers to...

LONDON — Lines at neighboring borders and protests are just some of the scenes in Russia following President Vladimir Putin’s call for partial military mobilization. Last week, Putin ordered up to 300,000 Russians to serve in the invasion of Ukraine that began in February. Since then, thousands of citizens have fled the country to bordering nations, including Georgia and Mongolia. A satellite image of the Russia-Georgia border taken on Tuesday shows a multitude of cars and people waiting at the crossing. According to Russian state news outlet Tass, more than 5,000 cars had created the traffic jam, which was up...

An American citizen spearheading the California secessionist movement said he’ll open an embassy in Moscow this weekend as his separatist campaign looks toward Russia for recognition.Louis Marinelli, the president of the Yes California Independence Campaign, plans to open the doors Sunday to the Golden State’s first ever “embassy” in none other than the Russian capital.Mr. Marinelli, 30, has been one of the most vocal proponents in recent years of the grassroots movement dedicated towards gaining California’s independence from the United States. He’s orchestrated that campaign from abroad since at least September, however, when he relocated from San Diego to Siberia to be with...

Sanctions strengthened Putin and caused “unfriendly nations” to form a closer alliance against the West. As the West suffers from an energy crisis with no solution in sight, Russia is benefitting from this in more ways than one. You may have heard of the China–Russia East-Route Natural Gas pipeline or the Yakutia–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok pipeline. Construction was approved in 2007, and in 2012, Putin ordered Gazprom to begin construction and renamed the project “Power of Siberia.” China and Russia signed a 30-year deal for $400 billion in 2014, and by December 2019, the pipeline was functional. The mainstream media focuses on the...

Artist's impression of the catastrophe. (Katrina Kenny © 2022, author provided) Some 252 million years ago the world was going through a tumultuous period of rapid global warming. To understand what caused it, scientists have looked to one particular event in which a volcanic eruption in what is now Siberia spewed huge volumes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. However, there is evidence the climate was already changing before this. Sea surface temperatures had increased by more than 6-8 ℃ in the hundreds of thousands of years leading up to the Siberian outpouring. Temperatures increased again after it, so much...

A senior Russian official finally admitted that Stalin's secret police shot dead Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of central European Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945. For decades the Soviet authorities insisted that Wallenberg had died of a heart attack in 1947 in a Soviet prison, but speculation about his fate grew into a full-blown mystery as gulag inmates surfaced to report sightings of the Swede in Siberia into the 1950s.

VLADIMIR PUTIN is fighting a "second front" as wildfires ravage Russia distracting resources from the Ukraine invasion as the damage spreads. Thousands of acres of Siberian forest are currently experiencing the flames causing massive destruction to the region. Areas affected include Omsk, Tyumen and Krasnoyarsk, all in Siberia, and all seeing towers of black smoke in the skies. …snip According to local official Aleksey Yaroshenko, some of the forest fires are now out of control, and are more widespread than initially reported...

An icy barrier up to 300 stories high — taller than any building on Earth — may have prevented the first people from entering the New World over the land bridge that once connected Asia with the Americas, a new study has found.These findings suggest that the first people in the Americas instead arrived via boats along the Pacific coast, researchers said...Based on stone tools dating back as much as 13,400 years, archaeologists had long suggested that people from the prehistoric culture known as the Clovis were the first to migrate from Asia to the Americas. Prior work regarding the...

Vladimir Putin has been accused of deporting Ukrainians to 'filtration' centres before forcibly taking them to remote Siberian towns after confiscating their phones and documents. 'Several thousand' people have so-far been taken, Mariupol city council claimed, before being processed through 'filtration camps' and sent to 'remote cities' in Russia where they will be obliged to stay for years and work for free. -snip- Russian news agencies have reported that buses carrying hundreds of refugees from the besieged southeastern port city Mariupol had arrived in Russia in recent days. Moscow officials also said a trainload of over 280 Ukrainians were being...

Russian politicians who voted to recognise the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk are now saying they regret their decision and have condemned Vladimir Putin's invasion. Dissent to the war is growing not only on the streets in Russia, with thousands arrested during protests, but also in parliament where dissent against the leader is rare. Three members of the Communist Party, which typically remains loyal to Putin on key issues, have spoken out against the military action, saying they did not realise what they were voting for. Vyacheslav Markhaev, a senator from Siberia, wrote on Facebook that Putin 'hid plans to...

The incident started when coal dust in a ventilation shaft caught fire on Thursday, filling the Siberian mine with smoke and killing 11. By nightfall, a failed operation to reach dozens of missing miners had turned to tragedy after several rescuers reportedly suffocated. An emergency services source told one news agency "no one is left alive". The majority of the 285 people in the the Listvyazhnaya mine, in the Kemerovo region some 3,500km (2,175 miles) east of Moscow, escaped in the immediate aftermath of the incident, at around 08:35 local time (01:35 GMT) on Thursday. Officials said 49 had been...

Previous studies had indicated that while most mammoths likely died out around 10,000 years ago, a few had managed to survive in small populations on remote islands off the coast of Siberia. There had even been suggestions that some of these isolated island populations had held on until around 4,000 years ago. Now though, the results of a ten-year study involving the collection and analysis of 535 samples of sediment and permafrost from Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia have yielded evidence to suggest that mammoths had still been roaming the wilds of mainland Siberia as recently as 3,900 years ago....