It’s a mammoth worry

I haven’t heard from them in 20,000 years but recently my remote Woolly ancestors have been emerging from the Russian permafrost. It is exciting to see the woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros again.

When the mammoth and woolly rhino last roamed the tundra in the late Pleistocene Era (20,000 to 50,000 years ago) the human population was precarious. As low as just a few thousand and never much more than ten thousand. But hell, who was counting? Back then folk had no time to conduct a Stone Age census. They were flat out avoiding being trampled underfoot by giants like the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros.

Or eaten by giant cave lions, another ferocious critter to have lately re-emerged in the Russian thaw.

With the melting of the Arctic permafrost due to global warming (it’s really getting a bit late to argue about this) it was the woolly mammoths which first emerged.

After 200 centuries in the deep freeze they were surprisingly well preserved. Scientists were able to analyse their stomach contents as well as establishing the cause of their death.

In one case a group of these emerging animal relics appeared to have fallen off a cliff. There was speculation that they were driven over the edge by well-organised humans assisted by their new animal friend, the Eurasian wolf.

Man and dog were natural allies, both being devoted to what in more self-indulgent times would become known as the Paleo Diet.

Almost a quarter of the northern hemisphere is comprised of permafrost. It contains about double the amount of carbon already in the earth’s atmosphere and as it melts it releases greenhouse gasses, which of course speeds up the warming process.

Environmentally the downside is obvious but if you believe that our species is only here for a good time and not for a long time then there are a few upsides.

The Russians predict a mining boom now that oil and other minerals will be more easily extracted in a warmer climate.

And fortunes are already being made in the Siberian ivory rush. Hundreds of thousands of tusks from long dead mammoths are becoming available to illegal prospectors who are also interested in the horns of the woolly rhinoceros and the fangs of the giant cave lion.

In 2017 more than 72 tonnes of ivory was extracted from the Russian permafrost, most of it ending up in China as carved trinkets and curiously, as a traditional medicine.

Irony aside, really the only ‘good news’ is that the growing abundance of the new/ancient product might dampen down the demand for the ivory usually supplied by the illegal poaching of endangered African wildlife.

Along with oil and ivory the Russians are excited by the melting of the sea ice in the Arctic Sea which promises to open the legendary Northwest Passage to regular shipping this coming Arctic summer.

Tasmanians have a connection there with our one-time eccentric governor Sir John Franklin on whom the seagulls sit (forgive the ellipsis) in Franklin Square.

In 1845 Franklin went missing searching the frozen wastes for that fabled top of the world maritime shortcut from Europe to Asia and the Pacific.

Critics thought him mad, but it does seem that soon Russian oil and gas tankers will ply the sea route Franklin died looking for.

Certainly, that will be to the astonishment of the polar bears who now look like going the way of the woolly mammoths.

The difference today from 25,000 years ago, is the rapidity of the change.

Extinctions due to the processes of planetary climate change (warming or cooling) normally take tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.

So, animals under a slower growing challenge have time to evolve, adapt and relocate. The two living species of elephant today are closely related to the extinct mammoths.

Just like my more recent Scottish forebears, it looks like my woolly mammoths had the good sense to migrate somewhere warmer and to shed their hairy kilts.

In climate change this time round, as humans continue to release vast amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, things are cooking too quickly for the usual gradual processes of adaption. We are now looking at dramatic changes over just two or three generations.

Large numbers of animal species will not cope.

As humans have already experienced with diseases like ebola and COVID, such times favour fast adapters like viruses, rather than the complex and delicate organisms on which viruses live.

And for a virus, as opportunities shrink in the wild world, where better to live than on the great meat mass of humanity.

Science tells us the rapid species loss we are seeing today is thousands of times greater than the natural extinction rate in the fossil record of the Earth.

Sir David Attenborough, who has a passing knowledge of the subject, warns that half of our eight and a half million species might die this century.

That would be the biggest mass extinction since an asteroid, 10km across, hit the planet 65 million years ago.

Still, Attenborough is hopeful we can make the right decisions.

“The survival of humanity and our fellow creatures on Earth depends upon it. We have the capacity and the knowledge to stop the damage we are doing,” Attenborough says.

Let us all hope Sir David is right.

But, just quietly, I wouldn’t recommend betting the house on it. Though in reality, I guess we already have.