Siberia ice road riskier than ever
At a truck stop at the northern terminus of the Vilyui ice highway in northeastern Siberia, drivers make small talk not about life on the road but rather the life of the road.
It might last another week, suggested one driver casually, tucking into a steaming plate of meatballs.
“Not likely,” countered Maxim A. Andreyevsky, 31, the driver of a crude oil tanker truck. “Didn’t you see the shimmer on the surface? It will be gone in a day or two.”
Every spring, thousands of miles of so-called winter highway in Russia, mostly serving oil and mining towns in Siberia and far northern European Russia, melt back into the swamps from which they were conjured the previous fall. And every year, it seems to the men whose livelihoods depend upon it, the road of ice melts earlier.
That insight has turned Tas-Yuryakh, a tiny village of log cabins that depends on the ice highway for business at its truck stop and gas station — the last gas for 817 kilometres — into a hotbed of true believers in the human contribution to climate change.
“Of course people are to blame,” Andreyevsky said. “They pump so much gas, they pump so much oil. Brother, we need Greenpeace out here.”
With highways made of ice, including the icy surfaces of deep lakes and rivers, all it takes is one pleasantly warm spring day for the highway to vanish. Every year, officials say, at least one big rig goes through the ice of a lake or big river.
“The danger is always with the daring truck drivers,” said Aleksandr A. Kondratiev, the director of the regional department of roads in Mirny, a diamondmining town in northeastern Siberia linked to the rest of Russia to the south only by the Vilyui ice road. Most of the time, he said, they escape with their lives.
When the Vilyui ice highway first opened in 1976, its builders celebrated the occasion on Revolution Day, Nov. 7, Kondratyev said. These days, the road rarely opens before mid-December, he said, and it now typically closes April 1, about a month earlier than it used to.
Ice highways are integral to Russia’s mining and oil economy in the Far North, as they are in Canada and Alaska, where ice roads are also freezing later and melting earlier.
Ruslan A. Sizonov, a director of logistics at the Alrosa mining company, said the warming winters were shrinking the window for hauling in heavy equipment and fuel, even as the cost of the road remained the same.
Russia’s federal government contracts with the mining company to build the road, at an annual cost of about $3,050 (U.S.) per mile at the current exchange rate.
The Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of Earth, scientists say.
Last month, the maximum extent of Arctic Ocean ice cover was the second lowest since satellite recordkeeping began in the 1970s.