Scientists from Russia's Institute of Earth Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation carried out a study of the lakebed, RIA Novosti reported Thursday.
"A 3-D image of the bottom shows a 3-meter (10-foot) crater that could have very probably been created by impact with a large meteorite fragment," researcher Alexey Popov said.
The crater isn't directly beneath the hole in the ice but is around 30 feet to one side of it, he said.
Emergencies Ministry divers had searched the site in February but failed to find traces of the meteorite fragment in the thick layer of silt covering the lake bottom, officials said.
The meteorite that exploded over Russia Feb. 15 created a massive shock wave that blew out windows and damaged thousands of buildings around the city of Chelyabinsk, injuring 1,200 people.
Extinctions tied to Earth's volcanic past
NEW YORK, March 21 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say the abrupt disappearance of half of Earth's species 200 million years ago has been linked to a dated set of gigantic volcanic eruptions.
Researchers from Columbia University say the eruptions may have caused climate changes so sudden that many species were unable to adapt, and the pace of those changes could have occurred at a rate similar to that of human-influenced climate warming.
Geological deposits date the so-called End-Triassic Extinction at precisely 201,564,000 years ago, they said, exactly the same time as a massive outpouring of lava.
"This may not quench all the questions about the exact mechanism of the extinction itself," Columbia geologist Paul Olsen said. "However, the coincidence in time with the volcanism is pretty much ironclad."
The geologic deposits analyzed in the study were from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, a series of huge eruptions known to have started around 200 million years ago when nearly all Earth's land was massed into one huge continent.
The eruptions spewed an estimated 2.5 million cubic miles of lava in four sudden spurts over a 600,000-year span -- a period when pollen, spores and other fossils characteristic of the Triassic era disappeared, researchers said.
Deposits linked to the volcanic episodes have been found everywhere in the world the researchers have looked, leading Columbia paleomagnetism expert Dennis Kent to say the eruptions "had to be a hell of an event."