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(Last year I reviewed a great documentary titled "Genesis 2.0" about the
hunt for Woolly Mammoth skeletons in Yakutsk:
https://louisproyect.org/2018/12/30/genesis-2-0/. Unfortunately, the
only way to see this film is to buy the DVD for $20 on Amazon. If this
article and my review interest you, I'd urge you to buy the DVD because
the issues it raises are truly mind-boggling.)
NY Times, Aug. 4, 2019
Russian Land of Permafrost and Mammoths Is Thawing
By Neil MacFarquhar
YAKUTSK, Russia — The lab assistant reached into the freezer and lifted
out a football-size object in a tattered plastic grocery bag, unwrapping
its muddy covering and placing it on a wooden table. It was the severed
head of a wolf.
The animal, with bared teeth and mottled fur, appeared ready to lunge.
But it had been glowering for some 32,000 years — preserved in the
permafrost, 65 feet underground in Yakutia in northeastern Siberia.
As the Arctic, including much of Siberia, warms at least twice as fast
as the rest of the world, the permafrost — permanently frozen ground —
is thawing. Oddities like the wolf’s head have been emerging more
frequently in a land already known for spitting out frozen woolly
mammoths whole.
The thawing of the permafrost — along with other changes triggered by
global warming — is reshaping this incredibly remote region sometimes
called the Kingdom of Winter. It is one of the coldest inhabited places
on earth, and huge; Yakutia, if independent, would be the world's eighth
largest country.
The loss of permafrost deforms the landscape itself, knocking down
houses and barns. The migration patterns of animals hunted for centuries
are shifting, and severe floods wreak havoc almost every spring.
The water, washing out already limited dirt roads and rolling corpses
from their graves, threatens entire villages with permanent inundation.
Waves chew away the less frozen Arctic coastline.
Indigenous peoples are more threatened than ever. Residents joust
constantly with nature in unpredictable ways, leaving them feeling
baffled, unsettled, helpless, depressed and irritated.
“Everything is changing, people are trying to figure out how to adapt,”
said Afanasiy V. Kudrin, 63, a farmer in Nalimsk, a village of 525
people above the Arctic Circle. “We need the cold to come back, but it
just gets warmer and warmer and warmer.”
Climate change is a global phenomenon, but the shifts are especially
pronounced in Russia, where permafrost covers some two-thirds of the
country at depths ranging up to almost a mile.
“People don’t comprehend the scale of this change, and our government is
not even thinking about it,” said Aleksandr N. Fedorov, deputy director
of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute, a research body in Yakutsk, the
regional capital.
In Yakutia, almost 20 percent of Russia, distances are vast and
transportation erratic. The population is just under one million.
Natives joke that every resident could claim one lake.
Yakutia’s 33 districts are the size of countries. In the far northeast,
the Srednekolymsk district, which lies entirely above the Arctic Circle,
is slightly smaller than Greece. Just 8,000 residents live in 10
villages, including 3,500 in the capital, also Srednekolymsk.
The region has been a synonym for remote for centuries. Empress
Elizabeth exiled the first prominent political prisoner to Srednekolymsk
in 1744, when it took a year to reach overland from St. Petersburg.
There are just two main highways transiting Yakutia, with the one built
mostly by Gulag prisoners under Communism still largely unpaved.
In Srednekolymsk, summer used to last from June 1 to Sept. 1, but now
extends a couple weeks longer on both ends. Outsiders might not notice
that the thermometer in January often hovers around -50 F, rather than
-75 F. Residents call -50 “chilly.”
In a regionwide pattern, the average annual temperature in Yakutsk has
risen more than four degrees, to 18.5 F from 14 F, over several decades,
said Mr. Fedorov of the permafrost institute.
Warmer winters and longer summers are steadily thawing the frozen earth
that covers 90 percent of Yakutia. The top layer that thaws in summer
and freezes in winter can extend down as far as 10 feet where three feet
used to be the maximum.
Eroding cliffs on riverbanks expose other areas, like where the wolf
head appeared, that had long been deeply buried.
Across Yakutia, farmers have replaced tens of thousands of cows with
native horses who eat less hay, but produce less milk. The market for
their meat is limited.CreditEmile Ducke for The New York Times
The thawing permafrost, and increased precipitation, have made the land
wetter. The snow and rain create a vicious circle, forming an insulating
layer that speeds defrosting underground.
Water backing up behind ice floes now causes ravaging floods virtually
every May.
In Srednekolymsk last year, floods swamped the dirt airstrip, with its
separate outhouses for men and women. Often battered Soviet turboprops
are the lifeline to the world, but the airstrip had to close for a week.
Nalimsk, 11 miles north of Srednekolymsk, has flooded five years in a
row. Mosquitoes grown fat in the expanding bogs swarm like kamikaze
pilots. “Free acupuncture!” joked Vasily P. Okoneshnikov, 54, the
village headman.
Plump black Turpan ducks used to arrive regularly during the first week
of June. This year migrating birds began to descend on May 1. There were
far fewer Turpans, and suddenly geese, a novelty.
Elsewhere, the migration routes of wild reindeer have shifted, while
unfamiliar insects and plants inhabit the woods.
Nalimsk hunters once stored their fish and game in a 22-foot deep cave
dug out of the permafrost, a kind of natural freezer. Now its thawing
walls drip water, and the meat rots.
“We buy meat and it is no good, too dry,” Mr. Okoneshnikov said. “We
have no choice, even if it’s shameful” to shop, rather than hunt.
Farther north, residents refuse to abandon their waterlogged, riverfront
villages, afraid of losing access to whitefish, their staple diet.
The village of Beryozovka has flooded virtually every spring for a
decade, its 300 residents forced onto boats for weeks to run errands
like buying bread. They finally accepted a five-year project to move the
village 900 yards uphill.
In the district, Beryozovka has the only concentration of Even people,
one of various dwindling indigenous tribes.
The Even, who are reindeer herders, were settled only in 1954 through a
government drive. They speak a distinct language; individual clans
inherit ancestral songs.
“At some point they talked about abandoning the village, but people did
not want to move out,” said Octyabrina R. Novoseltseva, chairwoman of
the Northern Indigenous People’s Association in the Srednekolymsk
region. “They would lose everything, the culture would all disappear.”
The government in distant Moscow is an abstract concept. Alaska is
closer. Villagers throughout Yakutia bemoan relying on their own
resources to adapt to climate change.
Even state-run institutions like the permafrost institute lack the means
for the complicated field work needed to assess the full extent of
permafrost loss. Nor can they gauge other fallout, like how much methane
that microbes in the newly thawed ground produce, adding to global warming.
“We do not really monitor the situation, so we just have to see what it
brings,” said Yevgeny M. Sleptsov, the head of the Srednekolymsk
district, as he piloted a fishing boat along the Kolyma River at 10 p.m.
in the muted light of the endless Arctic day.
The government is also unable to do much about other environmental
problems, including wildfires surging through millions of acres of
remote forest across Yakutia and the rest of Siberia. Reaching them is
too costly.
In 1901, the first woolly mammoth discovered whole in the permafrost
emerged from a riverbank near Srednekolymsk, an event immortalized with
a stylized red mammoth on the town’s shield.
But thawing permafrost is exposing more of the huge hairy beasts, which
roamed a more temperate northern Siberia 10,000 years ago. And with
agriculture and hunting unreliable, more locals are looking for them.
Digging for mammoths is illegal, so the hunters are secretive, but one
ivory tusk sold to China can earn $16,000 — enough to live on for a year.
Tusk hunters unearthed the Pleistocene wolf head stored in the
Department of Mammoth Studies at the Academy of Science in Yakutsk.
The loss of permafrost also afflicts the capital, Yakutsk. Subsiding
ground has damaged about 1,000 buildings, said the mayor, Sardana
Avksentieva, while roads and sidewalks require constant repair.
As the permafrost thaws across Yakutia, some land sinks, transforming
the terrain into an obstacle course of hummocks and craters — called
thermokarst. It can sink further to become swamps, then lakes. From the
air, thermokarst looks as if giant warts are plaguing the earth. It
makes plowing or grazing on formerly flat fields impossible.
In Srednekolymsk, after a local veteran of the war in eastern Ukraine
went berserk, shooting dead a police officer and then himself, the
police preserved his corpse in an old natural freezer carved out of the
underground permafrost.CreditEmile Ducke for The New York Times
The skeleton of a mammoth in the lobby that the Museum of Archaelogy and
Ethnography shares with the Museum of Mammoths in Yakutsk. CreditEmile
Ducke for The New York Times
Thermokarsts besiege the Churapcha region, 120 miles east of Yakutsk.
Thirty-three families once inhabited the northern part of Usun-Kyuyol, a
village of 750 people. After their cow barns and fences repeatedly
collapsed, 10 families decamped. Those remaining feel beleaguered.
To find flat, dry land to grow hay, farmers work further and further away.
Across Yakutia, farmers have replaced tens of thousands of cows with
native horses. Horses consume less hay, but produce less milk, and the
market for their meat is limited. They also die in droves when their
hooves cannot penetrate thicker snow and ice to forage.
Nikolai S. Makarkov, 62, is building a new house. He tired of jacking up
his old one after it sank four times so that the doors would not open.
Water also seeped underneath, rotting the floorboards and freezing in
winter, chilling the interior.
Years ago, the village road ran straight, with log cabins and cow barns
arrayed along its length. Now the potholed muddy track meandering among
the hummocks barely resembles a road. Abandoned houses tilt at odd angles.
“There might as well have been a war here,” said Mr. Makarkov, whose new
house is raised off the ground on pillars sunk 16 feet, where there is
still permafrost. “Soon there will be no flat land left in this village.
I only have 30-40 years to live, so hopefully my new house will last
that long.”
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