Buffalo (bison) have roamed North America since prehistoric times. Twelve yearlings are being shipped from Alaska to Siberia's Pleistocene Park, where they will join other large herbivores at a remote preserve in an effort to slow methane release from thawing permafrost.

“People say, Oh, mammoth cloning is bad because it’s playing God. Are we trying to play God? We personally don’t have any problem with that. People were geoengineering all our lives. We invented towns. That’s also called geoengineering. It’s been happening and will be happening.” —Sergey Zimov

When it comes to sharing climate change scientific findings, and global warming’s devastating impacts to the Earth, there is simply no good news to report, says Alan Martin writing for alphr. Martin highlighted a “study from the University of Rochester in New York which has mathematically modelled the outcome of an intelligent species mining a planet’s resources and growing their populations accordingly”. The findings showed that there will be three likely sorry outcomes for us: the die off, the soft landing or full blown collapse of the biosphere. The soft landing version of events leads “to the planet irreversibly changing, but somehow civilisation transitions to a “new, balanced equilibrium. The planet transforms, but those to blame for its transformation get to live another day”. Lucky for them huh? It buys some of us time, but eventually, the end result will be the same as in the other two versions. Apologies for being Debbie Downer once again, but consider how we just might be able to assure that the soft landing will be our fate. If we choose to.

Comparison between a woolly mammoth (left) and an American mastodon (right)

The Pleistocene is named for the geological epoch that ended just 12,000 years ago, having begun 2.6 million years earlier. It is more commonly known as the Ice Age, and in reality, it was also the age of large swaths of the earths land mass covered in grass. These grasslands supported countless numbers of diverse and very large herbivores that fed on the grass, their hooves tearing up the surface and exposing the grass for grazing while their dung nourished the soil of the eco-system. When human populations began to expand across the planet, they brought death and extinction wherever they roamed. Our ancestors killed off most Ice Age mammals such as mammoth and these massacres of herbivores continued unabated until just recently, when the world came close to losing the North American buffalo in the late 1880’s. We now know that grasslands act as a straw that sucks carbon from the air while storing it in the soil forever.

Siberian tundra near Russia's Yenisey River in the summer of 1966

Once the herbivores were gone, bushes and trees began to colonize the former grasslands. This process is called shrubification in the far northern regions of the planet. Shrubification darkens the surface of the frozen tundra absorbing the suns energy and thawing the soil in a feedback loop, whereas grassland surface areas are light and able to reflect the sun’s radiation back to space keeping the methane locked in the frozen soil.

Within a few years the world’s human population will reach the eight billion mark. We devour the limited resources of the planet and we funnel our fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere to do so. Greenhouse gases are changing the Earth’s climate drastically. One of the life-ending triggers will be the thawing of the permafrost in the polar regions. The carbon rich frozen soil holds a mind boggling amount of carbon, thawing will release the most dangerous climate-change accelerants imaginable.

The same area in 2009.

Ross Andersen writes a must-read post in The Atlantic:

Every Arctic winter is an Ice Age in miniature. In late September, the sky darkens and the ice sheet atop the North Pole expands, spreading a surface freeze across the seas of the Arctic Ocean, like a cataract dilating over a blue iris. In October, the freeze hits Siberia’s north coast and continues into the land, sandwiching the soil between surface snowpack and subterranean frost. When the spring sun comes, it melts the snow, but the frozen underground layer remains. Nearly a mile thick in some places, this Siberian permafrost extends through the northern tundra moonscape and well into the taiga forest that stretches, like an evergreen stripe, across Eurasia’s midsection. Similar frozen layers lie beneath the surface in Alaska and the Yukon, and all are now beginning to thaw. If this intercontinental ice block warms too quickly, its thawing will send as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere each year as do all of America’s SUVs, airliners, container ships, factories, and coal-burning plants combined. It could throw the planet’s climate into a calamitous feedback loop, in which faster heating begets faster melting. The more apocalyptic climate-change scenarios will be in play. Coastal population centers could be swamped. Oceans could become more acidic. A mass extinction could rip its way up from the plankton base of the marine food chain. Megadroughts could expand deserts and send hundreds of millions of refugees across borders, triggering global war. “Pleistocene Park is meant to slow the thawing of the permafrost,” Nikita told me. The park sits in the transition zone between the Siberian tundra and the dense woods of the taiga. For decades, the Zimovs and their animals have stripped away the region’s dark trees and shrubs to make way for the return of grasslands. Research suggests that these grasslands will reflect more sunlight than the forests and scrub they replace, causing the Arctic to absorb less heat. In winter, the short grass and animal-trampled snow will offer scant insulation, enabling the season’s freeze to reach deeper into the Earth’s crust, cooling the frozen soil beneath and locking one of the world’s most dangerous carbon-dioxide lodes in a thermodynamic vault. To test these landscape-scale cooling effects, Nikita will need to import the large herbivores of the Pleistocene. He’s already begun bringing them in from far-off lands, two by two, as though filling an ark. But to grow his Ice Age lawn into a biome that stretches across continents, he needs millions more. He needs wild horses, musk oxen, reindeer, bison, and predators to corral the herbivores into herds. And, to keep the trees beaten back, he needs hundreds of thousands of resurrected woolly mammoths.

Pleistocene Park: The Regeneration of the Mammoth Steppe?



The Pleistocene Park proposal is deeply rooted in ecology, pedology (soil science) and climatology, as we shall see in the next post. The remainder to the current post examines its foundations in the geo-history of Siberia and the broader circum-polar realm. Driving the development of such a park is the idea that the ecosystems of Siberia, like those found in much of the rest of the world, are deeply out of kilter, thrown off their evolutionary trajectories by the loss of megafaunal diversity and keystone species. For millions of years, Siberia, like all other continental lands, had been the home of many large mammal species, which had evolved together along with the local vegetation. Over the ages, many individual species went extinct, but others emerged to replace them, thus maintaining high levels of diversity. The overall system proved resilient in the face of major climatic perturbations. Over the course of the Pleistocene epoch (2,588,000 to 11,700 years before present), cold glacial periods alternated with interglacial times like our own with little effect on wildlife beyond shifting their distributional patterns. During glacial periods, when massive icecaps formed over northern Europe and northern North America, Siberia remained largely ice-free. Although Siberia’s average annual temperatures were lower then than they are today, megafauna of various stripes continued to thrive in the region. During these cold, low-carbon-dioxide periods, sea level was much lower than it is today; as a result, Siberia and largely ice-free Alaska were connected by the exposed bed of the Bering Sea. The resulting landmass, Beringia, supported a substantial number of large mammals, the largest of which was the wooly mammoth.



From Alaska Public Media on the transport of Alaskan bred bison to re-wild Siberia.