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The Great Siberian Thaw
Article

The Great Siberian Thaw

Permafrost contains microbes, mammoths, and twice as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere. What happens when it starts to melt?

Joshua Yaffa
The New Yorker, 2022
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9

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This somber investigation into permafrost thaw in Siberia in Russia’s far northeast reveals that there is much that climate scientists don’t know, and don’t have a lot of time to find out. For centuries, making permafrost regions habitable had been a long-cherished goal for Russia. Now, having “conquered” it, they face new challenges. With rising temperatures in the far north, permafrost is melting at an alarming rate, damaging infrastructure and releasing carbon and methane. Can science reverse the trend and “refreeze” permafrost, or will the melt exacerbate the climate crisis? 

Summary

Permafrost occupies nine million square miles of the Earth’s surface, most of it in Russia.

Dubbed vechnaya merzlota, or “eternal frost” by Soviet scientist Mikhail Sumgin in the 1920s, permafrost captivates the imagination with its inscrutable grandeur. Spanning millions of square miles and with depths a mile deep in provinces such as Yakutia, it sits in the arctic regions in North America and occupies two-thirds of Russian territory, mostly in Siberia. It is an artifact of the glacial era three million years ago, freezing, thawing and refreezing as the planet cycled through ice ages. There is an estimated half a trillion tons of carbon locked in permafrost, twice as much as currently resides in the Earth’s atmosphere. For 150,000 years, it remained stable and inexorable. Now, with unprecedented warmth in the region, it is slowly melting.

Permafrost confounded explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries, as Russia expanded its empire eastward. Settlers in the city of Yakutsk, in Yakutia, encountered a “firm body of ice” that resisted all attempts at cultivation. “Shergin’s shaft,” dug in the 1820s, proved that permafrost was at ...

About the Author

Joshua Yaffa is based in New York and Moscow and is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. He has written for the Economist, The New York Times, National Geographic, Bloomberg Businessweek, New Republic and Foreign Affairs. He is the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin’s Russia.

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