Siberian thermokarst: Why melting ground and oil intertwine
Before Russian airspace closed, air traffic between Europe and Asia flew over Siberia. Having made that journey a few times myself, I remember seeing vast fields of thousands of miniscule ponds and lakes clustered together in Siberia.
This thermokarst landscape is well visible in aerial and orbital imagery. When I went to take a closer look, Siberian oil infrastructure was revealed.
Today, we explore why there is thermokarst in Siberia and why oil and gas fields coincide with it.
What we see
Let us first put ourselves on the map. Below shows where we are over central Russia, near Surgut which is a key oil production hub.
Today’s study area in central Russia / Western Siberia.
Look at the white areas above in the centre of the rectangle - it indicates water. Zooming in reveals a fascinating field of lakes in various sizes ranging from a few kilometres in diameter to dozens of meters - see below.
Fascinating thermokarst landscape full of watery holes.
Zooming closer still reveals an ever smaller fabric of waterbodies, and now oil infrastructure also comes into clear view with drilling pads as white rectangles and obviously the roads connecting to them.
Oil infrastructure intervowen with the thermokarst landscape. The white patches are well pads.
To me, it was a surprise seeing the sprawling oil infrastructure here, especially as interwoven with the thermokarst landscape. I knew Russia is big with oil & gas, but hadn’t really thought about where it’s located.
Why is there both oil and thermokarst?
Start with thermokarst
Thermokarst forms when an ice-rich permafrost melts, leaving hollows into the ground and the ground collapses onto itself. As more areas go through the process, smaller ponds are merged together, creating larger ones.
For this, a number of things are required: Water to create the ice, a flat enough area to hold that water, and dynamic freezing and melting temperatures to create both icy permafrost, and possibility for melting.
The West Siberian basin meets this criteria well. The name basin itself is a hint as this area is incredibly flat. Below image shows a simple Google Earth analysis using elevation data. It shows the basin as a blue flatland, with mountain ranges both east and west. The horizontal elevation profile stays only at around 85m above sea level for almost 1700 kilometers, and the North-South profile shows a mere 100m ascent over 1300 kilometres. To appreciate this flatness, it would correspond to less than 1 cm elevation difference between two ends of a football field.
Elevation analysis of the West SIberian Basin shows remarkable flatness on both West-East and North-South axes. The main thermokarst area seems to coincide with the middle “trench” of the North-South axis, where the river Ob also flows. Pinch to enlarge / Click to open.
It is not a particularly rainy area with around 60cm of average annual rainfall, but this combined with the flat area and cool tempereatures means any water that falls to ground in the basin will not flow or evaporate away in a hurry.
Finally, Siberia is cold. The average winter temperatures in this area are –20 celsius, with summer highs at 17 celsius, as seen in the 2000-2025 annual data below. This creates conditions for both permafrost, where the ground does not thaw in the summer, but also summers where thawing does happen here and there. As such, thermokarst is to an extent a natural part of the landscape. More on this later.
Temperature data for winter on left, summer on right, with today’s study area highlighted.
But why oil?
The same properties that make the West Siberian Basin ideal for thermokarst - flatness, size, and geology - also make it one of the most prolific petroleum systems on Earth.
The basin is essentially a giant depression in the continental crust that began forming a few hundred million years ago. Over this time, the flatness allowed sediments to accumulate in layers thousands of metres thick and buried within those layers were vast quantities of organic matter: Dead marine organisms, algae, plant debris. This is the story of oil everywhere.
In West Siberia, the oil migrated upward through porous sandstone layers until it hit a tight shale or permafrost barrier it couldn't pass through. So the permafrost is not just a bystander but part of the reason the hydrocarbons are still there. Obviously, none of this was directly inferred from satellite imagery, but the “basin” was the original clue.
The present-day connection
While thermokarst is a natural process, global warming has significantly accelerated permafrost thaw across Siberia. The irony is hard to miss: Oil is being pumped from the very landscape that warming is actively destabilizing.
Oil infra crossing the dynamic thermokarst ground.
The consequences are practical and immediate. Roads, pipelines, and well pads built on frozen ground were engineered for a permafrost that is no longer as permanent as its name suggests. As the ground softens and subsides, infrastructure tilts, cracks, and fails. Russia has thousands of kilometres of pipeline crossing permafrost terrain and maintenance costs must be rising. Though I reckon it is interruptions to output that is more costly than the maintenance itself.
I won’t go into methane trapped and being released from the permafrost as part of this process, but safe to say this story does get worse from a climate change perspective.
Conclusion
Like often, this post started as a simple observation of interesting terrain, and led to secondary finding of oil infra, leading to interesting mini-investigation of the connection between the two, which to me wasn’t clear in the beginning.
Satellite data this time was the hook or revelator, and helped explain the geography of the basin. The incredible, globally unique flatness of West Siberia was a new thing for me. But even with that, satellite data only got me so far. Basic understanding of permafrost, oil deposit formation and global warming completed the story.
See you,
Orbital Vantage
