Russian Land of Permafrost and Mammoths Is Thawing

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/world/europe/russia-siberia-yakutia-permafrost-global-warming.html

Russian Land of Permafrost and Mammoths Is Thawing
Global warming is shrinking the permanently frozen ground across Siberia, disrupting everyday life in one of the coldest inhabited places on earth.
By Neil MacFarquhar
Photographs by Emile Ducke
Aug. 4, 2019

YAKUTSK, Russia — The lab assistant reached into the freezer and lifted out a football-size object in a tattered plastic grocery bag, unwrapping its muddy covering and placing 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 glowering for some 32,000 years — preserved in the permafrost, 65 feet 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 huge; Yakutia, if independent, would be the world's eighth largest country.


The landscape of the village of Usun-Kyuyol in Yakutia, Russia, is disfigured by thermokarsts, hummocks caused by the shifting temperatures underground.


Water has inundated the cemetery in Srednekolymsk, shifting the graves.


Afanasiy V. Kudrin, 63, a farmer in Nalimsk, showing a permafrost cellar whose walls now drip water.


A 32,000-year-old wolf head, which had been frozen in permafrost 65 feet underground.


In Yakutsk more than 1,000 buildings have been destroyed as global warming melts the permafrost under the foundations of buildings. This structure is on stilts to try to prevent its heat from melting the permafrost.

[Marcuse]

1. Dangerous micro organisms against which we have no immunity.

[link:http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up|

However, what would happen if we were suddenly exposed to deadly bacteria and viruses that have been absent for thousands of years, or that we have never met before?
We may be about to find out. Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life.