Siberia’s Permafrost Is Thawing
THE LAB ASSISTANT reached into the freezer and lifted out an object in a tattered plastic grocery bag, unwrapped its muddy covering and placed 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 snarling for some 32,000 years — preserved in the permafrost, about 20 meters 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 it is 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. They feel helpless and unsettled.
“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 of up to almost a kilometer and a half.
“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, which is almost 20 percent of Russia’s land mass, distances are vast and transportation is limited. The population is just under one million. 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.
In Srednekolymsk, summer used to last from June 1 to September 1, but now extends a couple weeks longer on both ends. The thermometer in January hovers around -46 degrees Celsius, rather than -59 C. Residents call -46 “chilly.”
In a regionwide pattern, the average annual temperature in Yakutsk has risen to -7.5 C from -10 C, over several decades, Mr. Fedorov said.
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 three meters where less than a meter used to be the maximum.
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. Soviet turboprops are the lifeline to the world, but the airstrip had to close for a week.
Elsewhere, the migration routes of wild reindeer have shifted, while unfamiliar insects and plants inhabit the woods.
Hunters in Nalimsk, 18 kilometers north of Srednekolymsk, once stored their fish and game in a seven-meter cave dug out of the permafrost, a kind of natural freezer. Now, the meat rots.
The village of Beryozovka has flooded virtually every spring for a decade, its 300 residents forced onto boats to run errands. Beryozovka has the only concentration of Even people, one of various dwindling indigenous tribes.
“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. Villagers are largely on their own. Even staterun groups like the permafrost institute lack the means 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 the permafrost thaws, some land sinks, transforming the terrain into an obstacle course of hummocks and craters — called thermokarst. It can sink to become swamps, then lakes. It makes plowing or grazing impossible.
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 die off 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, which sank four times.
Years ago, the village road ran straight, with log cabins along its length. Now the potholed muddy track 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 nearly five meters, 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.”
Centuries-old migration routes shift as the ice melts.