Such animals trample the snow, making it much more compact so the winter cold can get through to the ground, rather than it acting as a thick insulating blanket. Zimov wants to slow the thaw in one area of Yakutia by populating a nature reserve called the Pleistocene Park with large herbivores including bison, horses and camels. Whole cities sit on permafrost and its thawing could cost Russia 7 trillion roubles ($100 billion) in damage by 2050 if the rate of warming continues, scientists say.īuilt on the assumption that the permafrost would never thaw, many homes, pipelines and roads in Russia's far north and east are now sinking and increasingly in need of repair. Zimov, with his white beard and cigarette, ignored orders to leave the Arctic when the Soviet Union collapsed and instead found funding to keep the Northeast Science Station near the part-abandoned town of Chersky operating.Ĭiting data from a U.S.-managed network of global monitoring stations, Zimov says he now believes the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that permafrost has begun to release greenhouse gases.ĭespite factories scaling back activity worldwide during the pandemic which also dramatically slowed global transport, Zimov says the concentration of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been growing at a faster rate. Meanwhile permafrost emissions, which are seen as naturally occurring, are not counted against government pledges aimed at curbing emissions or in the spotlight at U.N. Scientists say that greenhouse gas emissions from its thaw could eventually match or even exceed the European Union's industrial emissions due to the sheer volume of decaying organic matter. Permafrost covers 65% of Russia's landmass and about a quarter of the northern landmass. (Open in an external browser to see a picture package) I think this is linked to our permafrost.' 'Methane has never increased in the atmosphere at the speed it is today. 'This is one of the coldest places on earth and there is no permafrost,' he says. Zimov, who has studied permafrost from his scientific base in the diamond-producing Yakutia region for decades, is seeing the effects of climate change in real time.ĭriving a thin metal pole metres into the Siberian turf, where temperatures are rising at more than three times the world average, with barely any force, the 66-year-old is matter-of-fact. CHERSKY, Russia, Nov 4 (Reuters) - In one of the planet's coldest places, 130 km south of Russia's Arctic coast, scientist Sergey Zimov can find no sign of permafrost as global warming permeates Siberia's soil.Īs everything from mammoth bones to ancient vegetation frozen inside it for millennia thaws and decomposes, it now threatens to release vast amounts of greenhouse gases.

The land of always winter