Scientist's climate research in remote Siberia is heating up discussions in the West |
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The field work is grueling. Because of the harsh conditions, Zimov has to station one of his five workers near the data-collection towers virtually round-the-clock to maintain them and cull information from them weekly. For Marat Ilyasov, 28, that means living day and night inside a tiny, one-room cabin amid a wasteland of snow, alone and a two-hour walk from town. He gets food delivered by snowmobile, has a walkie-talkie for emergencies and relies on a stack of books to keep him occupied. "I don't need communication with other people so often", Ilyasov said with a sigh, "so this is a good job for me". In Siberia, the permafrost entombs billions of tons of organic matter from the Ice Age, when northern Russia's steppe teemed with mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, musk oxen and other wildlife. Dormant for millennia, the permafrost is being thawed by global warming, triggering the microbial consumption that results in the release of greenhouse gases. The process feeds on itself. As the climate warms, permafrost on the banks of Siberian lakes collapses into the water, supplying bacteria with more organic material to consume and further raising the level of methane released into the air. The melting of permafrost cannot be stopped, Zimov said, but it could be slowed. Not far from the research station is a 40,000-acre tract of wilderness that Zimov believes could one day turn the tide against permafrost thaw. He calls it Pleistocene Park, after the Ice Age epoch when mammoths roamed Siberia. Zimov is reintroducing the grasses and herbivores that dominated northern Siberian steppes 10,000 years ago, and he plans to bulldoze portions of the park's larch forest and shrubland. Foxtail and cotton grass are taking root, providing fodder for Yakutian horses, reindeer, musk oxen and bison Zimov envisions on the park's flatlands. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ |