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Usually ignored in climate change strategies is the urgent necessity for a Pleistocene Park, which would encompass most of the Arctic hemisphere. Here lies the world’s biggest carbon sink: permafrost. It encompasses some 2.5 million square miles on land, with another similar-sized reservoir lying beneath the ocean floor. The massive release of methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide—formerly trapped securely in permafrost until dangerous leaks and craters began to emerge in the 1960s—is one of the most unpredictable and frightening scenarios of anthropogenic climate change. The methane released by these growing holes in the ground is 25 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. What has become known as the Batagaika Crater in the Sakha Republic of Eastern Siberia is an ominous 81-hectare hole in the permafrost, which has been expanding at a rate of 15 meters annually. It emerged as a result of deforestation; stripping the ground of shading trees increased ground temperatures and caused the permafrost to melt. During the time of its emergence, the crater was kept secret from the world through Soviet censorship and was only discovered through the interpretation of satellite imagery by scientists in democratic countries. This massive, growing crater, often called the “Gateway to Hell,” has exposed the remains of animals killed off by humans at the end of the Pleistocene era. Remains of extinct animals found here include the Woolly Mammoth, the Woolly Rhinoceros, and the Lena Horse, with its flesh and even blood intact. Musk Oxen skeletons have also been unearthed. Musk Oxen were reintroduced from Canada to western Siberia in 1974. However, there had been no Musk Oxen in what is now the Sakha Republic since the species was extirpated through overhunting around 555 BC. They have now been restored to Pleistocene Park. Musk Oxen were also restored to Wrangel Island, surrounded by the Arctic Ocean, from Canadian populations in 1975. Wrangel Island was the last refuge for the Woolly Mammoth before it was exterminated shortly after the arrival of human hunters armed with projectile spears around 2000 BC. This appears to have ended the debate over climate change versus human hunting as the primary cause of the Woolly Mammoth’s extinction.
While originally sparked by clear-cutting over frozen land, the Batagaika Crater continues to expand because of global trends in climate change. Twenty other craters, created from explosions that ignite debris, have emerged over melting permafrost in other parts of Siberia. Most have appeared in areas of extensive petroleum exploration and development. Scientists believe this figure is disguised by some craters becoming lakes, which are also unleashing methane into the atmosphere.
The Republic of Sakha has experienced some of the most rapid temperature increases and highest rates of permafrost melt in the world. More worrisome than the Batagaika Crater is the loss of 10 to 11 square kilometers annually in Sakha from permafrost melt, causing ground subsidence on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
The town closest to the Batagaika Crater, Chersky, displays some of the most dramatic demonstrations of permafrost melt. Its buildings are shaking and shifting from the sinking ground. Roads have caved in. Woolly Mammoth remains are frequently uncovered in the muddy, melting earth.
Since the Sakha Republic faces some of the worst consequences of melting permafrost, it is understandable and appropriate that it has inspired one of the most practical responses to this danger: the concept of Pleistocene Park. Its goal is to restore the full assemblage of mammals that thrived in the Pleistocene era. The decline of these mammals during the transition to the human-dominated Holocene era, alongside more recent declines in caribou populations, has reduced the insulation of packed snow on top of the permafrost. It has also increased temperatures that melt the permafrost due to a lack of intensifying herbivore grazing.
What is tragic today is that the judicious approach advocated by the Zimovs for the permafrost belt north of the Arctic Circle is not being followed by governments in Russia, the United States, and Canada.
In the words of the founder of the 160-square-kilometer nature sanctuary, Sergey Zimov, expressed in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science, the goal of Pleistocene Park is to repair the damage caused by humans in the Holocene era. Zimov wrote that it “stands to reason that the landscapes” of the Pleistocene “can be reconstituted by the judicious return of the appropriate herbivore community.” This is what Zimov and his son, Nikita, have been doing since 1988 at what was then the Soviet-era Northeast Science Station.
The first actions by the Zimovs were to increase the populations of existing moose and caribou herbivores, whose numbers had been diminished by a post-Soviet plague of poaching. They also introduced hardy, domestic Yakutian horses to substitute for the ecological impacts of the exterminated Lena Horse. Musk Oxen were restored from other Siberian populations, most notably and successfully from the Putorana Nature Reserve. Pleistocene Park is protected by a 600-square-kilometer buffer zone administered by the Republic of Sakha, which safeguards it from the impacts of industrial exploitation. These efforts have successfully lowered temperatures above the permafrost by two degrees Celsius.
The Zimovs currently have bulldozers stand in for the vanished Woolly Mammoth, which had the capability to knock down trees to create a more biologically diverse ecosystem. They hope that if efforts to genetically modify Indian Elephants to survive the Arctic cold succeed, they will eventually be released into Pleistocene Park.
What is tragic today is that the judicious approach advocated by the Zimovs for the permafrost belt north of the Arctic Circle is not being followed by governments in Russia, the United States, and Canada. The only large areas of permafrost where significant numbers of Musk Oxen and caribou can cool the earth are the domains of the still-mighty Porcupine and Taimyr caribou herds. These lands represent only a small percentage of the threatened terrestrial permafrost belt.