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Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground – Washington Post
ON THE ZYRYANKA RIVER, Russia — Andrey Danilov eased his motorboat onto the gravel riverbank, where the bones of a woolly mammoth lay scattered on the beach. A putrid odor filled the air — the stench of ancient plants and animals decomposing after millennia entombed in a frozen purgatory.
“It smells like dead bodies,” Danilov said.
The skeletal remains were left behind by mammoth hunters hoping to strike it rich by pulling prehistoric ivory tusks from a vast underground layer of ice and frozen dirt called permafrost. It has been rapidly thawing as Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet’s warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia’s temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.
Andrey Danilov, a part-time hunter of ancient mammoth tusks, treks through an area of the Zyryanka River in Russia’s Siberia that has been made rich in ivory by thawing permafrost.
A Washington Post analysis found that the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.
The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.
“The warming got in the way of our good life,” said Alexander Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in the regional capital of Yakutsk. “With every year, things are getting worse and worse.”
For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.
In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.
Thawing permafrost turns into mud along the river banks near Zyryanka.
The impact on farming has been catastrophic.
Arkhipov produces fermented mare’s milk called kumys, a delicacy among the Sakha, a Turkic people who make up roughly half the population of Yakutia. Arkhipov also raises foals for meat, which in Sakha culture is sometimes consumed sliced thin, raw and frozen.
In the past five years, Arkhipov said, he has lost close to four of his 70-odd acres of hay fields to permafrost-related flooding — meaning he can feed three fewer horses in the winter. And during a freak blizzard in late 2017 — an increasingly common occurrence in the region as the climate changes, scientists say — 10 of his horses died.
Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply.
Fedorov and other scientists say the degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.
Native Yakutian horses graze near the wreckage of a Soviet-era helicopter near Zyryanka. The pasture was part of an airport in the 1980s.
Vladimir Arkhipov corrals a horse into a wooden chute. Thawing permafrost is making pastures collapse or become swampland.
The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.
For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.
In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.
Visitors from the Ice Age
The idea that warming brings disaster is ingrained in the tradition of the Sakha people of Yakutia, the region laced by the Zyryanka and Kolyma rivers. An old Sakha prophecy says: “They will survive until the day when the Arctic Ocean melts.”
Village elders recalled the phrase after an episode of catastrophic flooding in 2005, according to Susan Crate, an anthropologist at George Mason University, who has long studied climate change in Siberia. The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe.
“Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.
Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.
This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.
And then there’s that rotting smell.
As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.
“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”
Against this backdrop, a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold. The long-frozen mammoth tusks — combined with Chinese demand for ivory — have imbued teetering local economies with a strike-it-rich ethos. Some people bask in instant money. But others watch in dismay as Siberia’s way of life is washed away.
Pipes traditionally are built aboveground in Yakutsk, Russia, because of the hard permafrost. As it thaws, it alters Siberia’s landscape as well as the region’s economy.
‘Nature is in control’
The first sign of change was the birds.
Over the past several decades, never-before-seen species started to show up in the Upper Kolyma District, an area on the Arctic Circle in northeastern Siberia 1,000 miles west of Nome, Alaska.
The new arrivals included the mallard duck and barn swallow, whose normal range was previously well to the south. A study published last year by Yakutsk scientist Roman Desyatkin said ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.
Then the land started to change.
Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.
The village of Nelemnoye was cut off for three months in late 2017 when the lakes and rivers didn’t fully freeze, stranding residents who use the frozen waters for transport. With the village in crisis, the government dispatched a helicopter to take residents grocery shopping.
Claudia Shalugina, 63, used to teach at the three-story school in Zyryanka, a 90-minute motorboat ride downriver. Around 10 years ago, the Kolyma River washed away a section of Zyryanka, taking Shalugina’s school with it.
The Kolyma River, through the windows of a Siberian hunting lodge.
Andrei Zimzyulin lounges at his fishing camp on the riverbank, where he spends about half of the year.
A decaying bust of Vladimir Lenin sits on the riverbank.
Satellite images show the loss of about 50 acres of land along the riverside, according to the geographic information firm Esri.
Smoking a cigarette on the porch of the village library, Shalugina offered her own analysis of the changing climate: “I think, ‘Lord, it’s probably going to be the end of the world.’ ”
Just downstream from where the Zyryanka River flows into the mighty Kolyma, three huge tractor-trailers stand abandoned on the forested riverbank. Weeds and wildflowers rise up around them. The frozen river, used as a winter ice road, suddenly became too risky to drive on.
Spring had come early this year — again.
“It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”
In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage. Meanwhile, six time zones away (but still in Siberia) on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.
Outside Zyryanka, a once-bustling farm has given way to a jumbled landscape of dips, bumps, and puddles. The mud road, what’s left of it, banks and turns at head-spinning angles, until it runs into a widening pond.
“The earth is slowly sinking,” horse farmer Vladimir Arkhipov said. “There’s more and more water and less and less usable earth.”
Thawing permafrost turns into mud along the river banks near Zyryanka.
The impact on farming has been catastrophic.
Arkhipov produces fermented mare’s milk called kumys, a delicacy among the Sakha, a Turkic people who make up roughly half the population of Yakutia. Arkhipov also raises foals for meat, which in Sakha culture is sometimes consumed sliced thin, raw and frozen.
In the past five years, Arkhipov said, he has lost close to four of his 70-odd acres of hay fields to permafrost-related flooding — meaning he can feed three fewer horses in the winter. And during a freak blizzard in late 2017 — an increasingly common occurrence in the region as the climate changes, scientists say — 10 of his horses died.
Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply.
Fedorov and other scientists say the degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.
Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks.
His grandfather, a peasant, was declared an enemy of the working class and sent to one of this region’s many gulag prison camps.
“As soon as you start getting used to something, they’ll come up with something else, and you have to adapt to everything all over again,” Prokopyev said.
Visitors from the Ice Age
The idea that warming brings disaster is ingrained in the tradition of the Sakha people of Yakutia, the region laced by the Zyryanka and Kolyma rivers. An old Sakha prophecy says: “They will survive until the day when the Arctic Ocean melts.”
Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.
This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.
And then there’s that rotting smell.
As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.
“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”
Against this backdrop, a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold. The long-frozen mammoth tusks — combined with Chinese demand for ivory — have imbued teetering local economies with a strike-it-rich ethos. Some people bask in instant money. But others watch in dismay as Siberia’s way of life is washed away.
Pipes traditionally are built aboveground in Yakutsk, Russia, because of the hard permafrost. As it thaws, it alters Siberia’s landscape as well as the region’s economy.
‘Nature is in control’
The first sign of change was the birds.
Over the past several decades, never-before-seen species started to show up in the Upper Kolyma District, an area on the Arctic Circle in northeastern Siberia 1,000 miles west of Nome, Alaska.
The new arrivals included the mallard duck and barn swallow, whose normal range was previously well to the south. A study published last year by Yakutsk scientist Roman Desyatkin said ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.
Then the land started to change.
Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.
The village of Nelemnoye was cut off for three months in late 2017 when the lakes and rivers didn’t fully freeze, stranding residents who use the frozen waters for transport. With the village in crisis, the government dispatched a helicopter to take residents grocery shopping.
Claudia Shalugina, 63, used to teach at the three-story school in Zyryanka, a 90-minute motorboat ride downriver. Around 10 years ago, the Kolyma River washed away a section of Zyryanka, taking Shalugina’s school with it.