re: Craters in Russia are mysteriously popping up everywhere.

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They're certainly not blasts. More like upwellings. At about 70 meters they're not exceptionally deep either. I would guess they're caused by a gas such as methane that accumulates as the tundra thaws and then pushes the ground up and out and then collapses back on itself

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I think you're close.

I'm not a thermodynamic or hydraulic engineer but my shot at what is going-on is more like this.

Relatively shallow underground voids fill with explosive natural gases with the voids being somewhere on top of a solid substrata and covered in a loamy, sandy, layer of who knows, maybe a kilometer or less.

Said void, or pocket, filled with natural gas slides over the granite subsrata, a natural tectonic process, until it eventually reaches dips in the solid granite substrata and this causes a sudden collapse of the pocket of gas which causes the loamy top cover to suddenly collapse on top of the pocket of gas ... and this, by means of the sudden compression, causes either a hydraulic recoil or thermodynamic explosion much as what is experienced inside of a diesel engine.

Now, with that said it's understood that methane would compress into a liquid before it would explode, to the best of my knowledge ... although I'm not sure how it would react to sudden and violent compression. But if you were to have a mixture of methane and oil I think you could probably get the desired effect.

The result would be a poof type explosion on the surface. Some matter shoved up and out with the rest collapsing back in on itself.

Anyways, that's what I believe is happening.

I'd like to know how far apart all these things are but I'd bet there is a pattern and it travels along the same line-direction that the plate is moving.