Pachyderms for permafrost

How to defuse the methane timebomb in the Arctic? Unleash the mammoths!

A scientist living deep in Siberia thinks that bringing mammoths back from extinction could keep the Arctic ground perma-frozen. Keeping it frozen is important. In some places the permafrost reaches a mile deep; thaw that out, and it will belch clouds of methane into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.

A new documentary explores this wonderfully off-the-wall idea.

How would it work? When snow piles up, it insulates the ground, preventing the earth from going into deep freeze. The scientist, Sergey Zimov, thinks that these revived mammoths would get hungry come wintertime and scrape off the snow to get at the grass underneath. Exposed to the icy darkness of Siberian winter, the ground would then freeze harder and stay frozen longer.

Zimov and his son, Nikita, now have a Kickstarter campaign to bring herbivores to a demonstration plot, which they call Pleistocene Park. They can’t bring in mammoths just yet, because as of today they’re still extinct, but scientists are working on that, too.