But for scientists, these discoveries can seem like a double-edged sword – they come as climate change and human activities thaw and carve up ground that has been frozen for thousands of years. In recent decades, many discoveries of ancient remains in North America, including that of the Nun cho ga baby mammoth, have been due to mining. “Without the mining activities, it would be really difficult for us to study the permafrost,” said Thomas Opel, a climate researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, who was in the Klondike region last month to survey future research sites. Mining carves out areas of permafrost that researchers like Opel can study to better understand climate cycles going back 100,000 years. But if not properly maintained, these excavated areas may have no further use. As the permafrost thaws, the land above it is destroyed, seen here in the village of Churapcha in Yakutia, eastern Russia, in September 2021. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters) “Sometimes it breaks my heart a little to see these lost landscapes,” Opel said. Similar prehistoric discoveries in Siberia have come as a result of crews blasting the permafrost and digging huge tunnels to uncover mammoth tusks – many of them destined for China, where demand for mammoth ivory has soared since the 2017 ivory ban. Tusk hunters, who often excavate illegally, tend to reject other parts they uncover, said Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University in Sweden. “These tunneling operations tend to produce very large quantities [ancient] bones and teeth that are just executed because they’re in the street, and thrown in a big pile outside and left there,” he said. “So for us, it’s valuable to be able to go there and sample [the bones and teeth] for DNA analysis’. Nicknamed Sparta, this cave lion died 28,000 years ago but was perfectly preserved with fur, whiskers and organs intact. This photo was released by scientists studying the lion on August 6, 2011. (Love Dalén) Dalén was part of the team that studied a pair of mummified prehistoric lions found by tusk hunters in the Russian permafrost four years ago. He also recently helped confirm that an 18,000-year-old puppy with fur and whiskers still intact was a wolf, not a dog. He said the hunters’ tunnels can give geologists a chance to study the permafrost from the inside if they’re given access — but they also cause a lot of damage to the local environment. “It basically removes the permafrost. After a few years, these tunnels will thaw to the point where they’ll collapse, and then the whole area where they tunneled will collapse and then wash into the river.”
Acceleration of defrosting
But scientists say climate change poses a far greater risk to permafrost than smaller-scale human activities. Arctic temperatures are rising much faster than the rest of the planet: parts of the Yukon and Northwest Territories broke heat records with temperatures above 31C earlier this month, while a Siberian city topped 38C in June 2020. The heat also causes long-frozen ground ice to thaw, leading to erosion and land subsidence that can damage buildings and infrastructure, especially around hillsides, lakes and coastal areas. Severe permafrost erosion threatens homes in the Yup’ik village of Quinhagak, in the Yukon Delta, Alaska, in April 2019. The Arctic is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images) But that’s not the only cause for concern. Within the permafrost is organic matter that, if thawed, would release billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane that have been trapped in the ice for thousands of years – in turn, further accelerating climate change. On Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island, far north of mainland Canada, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski is beginning to see some of these climate effects firsthand. In a once forested area where beavers, bears, camels and other animals roamed three to five million years ago, when the climate was 18 C to 20 C warmer, thawing permafrost now threatens a key fossil site known as Beaver Pond. During a 2006 expedition, Rybczynski discovered “massive slope failures” on the hillside where the site is located – one of the few in the Arctic to contain mammal fossils. Paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski wraps a piece of fossil in toilet paper to transport to a base camp on Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island in the summer of 2008. She says one of the fossil sites on the island is at risk of landslides from thawing permafrost. (Martin Lipman/Canadian Museum of Nature) “Potentially, at some point, our whole little fossil range could just fall off,” said Rybczynski, a researcher at the Canadian Museum of Nature and assistant research professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. “We just feel vulnerable — we think the site is vulnerable to being lost and it’s the only [site] that we were able to find so much biodiversity, in terms of vertebrates, so that’s something that worries us a bit.”
Resurrecting the Ice Age
While many scientists study the permafrost to understand past climates and the creatures that lived in it, some others hope to save the permafrost itself. On the edge of the Siberian tundra in northeastern Russia, Nikita Zimov and his father, Sergey, have spent the past 35 years recreating the kind of environment where the woolly mammoth thrived until about 11,000 years ago. Their vision is Pleistocene Park, a 14,000-hectare reserve with a fenced area slightly larger than Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, with wild grasses and about 150 animals, including bison, horses, moose, reindeer and, more recently, camels . Horses graze in the Pleistocene Park area outside the city of Chersky, in Russia’s Sakha Republic, in September 2021. Father and son Sergey and Nikita Zimov have championed an idea to slow the thawing of the permafrost by populating the park with large herbivores for to mimic those of the region’s ecosystem during the last ice age. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters) The animals, Nikita Zimov said, prevent the deep winter snow from acting as a literal blanket over the permafrost – lowering the ground temperature to reduce the risk of thawing and the release of greenhouse gases. “If you have something tasty under the snow and you have herbivores, those animals will come to that place and dig through the snow looking for food, and so they will trample the snow really badly,” he said. “Instead of half a meter to a meter of soft snow, which is a great heat insulator, you’ll have five to 10 centimeters of very compact snow cover, which loses its thermal insulation ability.” The Zimovs see a series of parks like theirs as the solution to the permafrost problem — though it would take millions of animals and many years to change the Arctic’s climate. Time is not on their side, with a group of international climate scientists warning that nearly 90 percent of the permafrost near the Earth’s surface could be gone by 2100 if emissions continue at current rates . This would also force the permafrost to reveal more of the ancient life it hides – with or without the help of miners or tusk hunters. Trees lean precariously at Duvanny Yar, southwest of Chersky, in September 2021. Duvanny Yar offers a side view of the thawing of permafrost taking place underground, where ancient flora and fauna have been frozen for millennia. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters) “Sooner or later, we’re going to find a man frozen in the permafrost that’s going to be 30,000 years old. And that’s going to teach us a lot about the first people, you know, what they wore, what they looked like,” Dalen said. “It’s just a matter of when.”
