Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground

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. 

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. 

“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. 

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. 

Read the story from The Washington Post - “Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground.”