by Vladimir ALEXEYEV, Dr. Sc. (Geogr.), Geocryology Institute, RAS Siberian Branch, Yakutsk; Geography Institute, RAS Siberian Branch, Irkutsk Today everything seems to be explored on earth. Not in Siberia, though. Siberia is a vast land stretching for thousands of kilometers all the way from the Urals in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. This land has many mysteries to it; one is that of the Patom crater (cone) in the Irkutsk region. This crater is named after two tributaries of the great Siberian river, the Lena-the Big and the Little Patom. For years the Patom crater has been attracting researchers involved with the earth sciences and botany-even mathematicians find it "groovy". A great many hypotheses have been advanced concerning the origin of this striking natural phenomenon. And yet it is still a mystery. In the opinion of the author of the present article, the Patom cone is a geocryological structure related to hydrovolcanicity--eruption of matter in frozen water-bearing systems giving rise to hummocks of swelling (bulging), the hydrolaccolites (called bulgunnyakhs in Yakutia, and pingos in Canada). стр. 54 THE NEST OF THE FIERY EAGLE It happened in August of 1949. Vadim Kolpakov, a young geologist surveying deep in the woodlands on the border of Yakutia and the Irkutsk administrative region, came upon an odd object that looked like a waste pile, a truncated cone with a hollow on top. It stood out in the locality as "whitish" and "rather young". Two years after, Kolpakov described his impressions in his contribution to the journal Priroda (Nature). "Coming up, I saw this quaint hill was not a human handiwork. Rather, it resembled an ideally round neck of a volcano, 70 meters tall, the height of a 25-story building... That natural anomaly, I guessed, was between 50 to 200 years old. Climbing up to the crater's ring bank, I discovered a semicircular 15 m dome right in the center of the trough... Talking to Yakut hunters, I ... Читать далее