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Javier E

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground - Washington Post - 0 views

  • Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet's warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia's temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.
  • the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.
  • The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.
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  • For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.
  • As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.
  • Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.
  • This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date of climate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.
  • In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.
  • Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.
  • a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold
  • ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.
  • “It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”
  • Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.
  • In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage.
  • on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.
  • Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply
  • he degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.
  • Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks.
  • . The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe. “Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.
  • The town of Zyryanka has warmed by just over 2 degrees Celsius from 1966 to 2016, according to their analysis.
  • The Post’s analysis, which uses a data set from Berkeley Earth, looks further back. It shows that Zyryanka and the roughly 2,000-square-mile area surrounding it has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius when the past five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s.
  • From 2005 to 2014, his team found, the number of days with below-freezing temperatures three feet below the surface fell from around 230 days a year to 190.
  • enormous wedges of ice lie under Yakutia.
  • “The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”
  • In the 1970s, Desyatkin said, the ground in the Middle Kolyma District, just north of Zyryanka, thawed to a depth of about two feet every summer. Now it thaws to more than three feet. That extra foot of thawing means that, on average, every square mile of territory has been releasing an additional 700,000 gallons of water into the environment every year
  • Meanwhile, ancient plant and animal remains trapped inside the Yedoma are exposed to nonfreezing temperatures — or even the open air. That, in turn, activates microbes, which break down the remains and unleash carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially from the thawing plant material.
  • Scientists estimate that the Earth’s Yedoma regions contain between 327 billion and 466 billion tons of carbon. Were it all released into the atmosphere, that would amount to more than half of all human-caused emissions from greenhouse gases and deforestation between 1750 and 2011
  • As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, more tusks will emerge. Though mammoths disappeared from the Siberian mainland some 10,000 years ago, the government estimates that 500,000 tons of their tusks are still buried in the frozen ground.
  • Supply and demand are so great that some people are collecting mammoth tusks at near-industrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time.
  • . In the glutted market, Sivtsev said, the price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.
  • climate change is leaving people with few choices. “They have to somehow support and feed their families.”
  • The ducks and geese are just about gone, he said, possibly moving to new habitats in Siberia as the climate shifts. The sable pelts aren’t as thick as they used to be. The shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are now less predictable, making hunting grounds harder to reach and restricting his ability to get goods to market.
  • In Nelemnoye, the population has declined to 180 from 210 in the past decade, according to village head Andrei Solntsev. Just 82 of the residents have work. Many factors are pushing people to move to the city — lack of Internet access, poor flight connections, limited job opportunities — but the uncertainty born of a changing climate looms over everything
  • As the permafrost thaws and recedes, a handful of apartment buildings there are showing signs of structural problems. Sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground — rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth. New apartment blocks are being built on massive pylons extending ever deeper — more than 40 feet — below ground
  • a study published this year that the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion — about 7.5 percent of the nation’s total annual economic output. They estimate the cost of mitigating the damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050.
Roth johnson

A Siberian Winter - 0 views

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    Great InFocus article about winter in Siberia, showing how cold and isolated it is. Provides a great visual representation of the hardship suffered by the people in Siberia.
peterconnelly

Siberian Students Uncover Soviet Peers' Wish for Peace in 50-Year-Old Time Capsule - Th... - 0 views

  • Students in Siberia have opened a 50-year-old time capsule containing a wish for peace and international friendship from their Soviet peers, local media reported Thursday.
  • The Soviet students’ message of hope for a peaceful future was unearthed as Russia faces unprecedented economic and political isolation in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. 
  • In a letter placed inside the time capsule, the Soviet middle schoolers recite the history of the Young Pioneers and boast of the engineering achievements of the U.S.S.R. before wishing their descendants peace and international cooperation.
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  • “Life is so beautiful and amazing, and you have to make it even more wonderful, so don’t waste your time ... Live your life the same way that the bright sun shines on everyone, so that your thoughts and deeds warm and delight everyone,” the message reads.
  • “May you have friends all over the world. May there always be peace!” 
Javier E

Clovis People Probably Not Alone in North America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “The colonization of the Americas involved multiple technologically divergent, and possibly genetically divergent, founding groups.”
  • Indeed, new genetic evidence described in the current issue of the journal Nature shows that the Americas appeared to be first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia: one large migration about 15,000 years ago, followed by two lesser migrations. Such a pattern had been hypothesized 25 years ago on the basis of Native American language groups spoken today, but had not been widely accepted by linguistics scholars.
  • human DNA from the cave, extracted from coprolites, or dried feces, pointed to Siberian-East Asian origins of the people.
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  • The findings lend support to an emerging hypothesis that the Clovis technology, named for the town in New Mexico where the first specimens were discovered, actually arose in what is now the Southeastern United States and moved west to the Plains and the Southwest. The Western Stemmed technology began, perhaps earlier, in the West. Most artifacts of that kind have been found on the West Coast and in Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. “We seem to have two different traditions coexisting in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years,” Dr. Jenkins said.
Javier E

New Studies of Permian Extinction Shed Light on the 'Great Dying' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Dr. Clapham and his co-author, Jonathan L. Payne, a Stanford geochemist, concluded that animals with skeletons or shells made of calcium carbonate, or limestone, were more likely to die than those with skeletons of other substances. And animals that had few ways of protecting their internal chemistry were more apt to disappear. Being widely dispersed across the planet was little protection against extinction, and neither was being numerous. The deaths happened throughout the ocean. Nor was there any correlation between extinction and how a creature moved or what it ate. Instead, the authors concluded, the animals died from a lack of dissolved oxygen in the water, an excess of carbon dioxide, a reduced ability to make shells from calcium carbonate, altered ocean acidity and higher water temperatures. They also concluded that all these stresses happened rapidly and that each one amplified the effects of the others. That led to a wholesale change in the ocean’s dominant animals within just 200,000 years, or perhaps much less, Dr. Clapham said.
  • So what happened 252 million years ago to cause those physiological stresses in marine animals? Additional clues from carbon, calcium and nitrogen isotopes of the period, as well as from organic geochemistry, suggest a “perturbation of the global carbon cycle,” the scientists’ second paper concluded — a huge infusion of carbon into the atmosphere and the ocean.
  • scientists suspect that the answer lies in the biggest volcanic event of the past 500 million years — the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, the stairlike hilly region in northern Russia. The eruptions sent catastrophic amounts of carbon gas into the atmosphere and, ultimately, the oceans; that led to long-term ocean acidification, ocean warming and vast areas of oxygen-poor ocean water
Javier E

DNA Deciphers Roots of Modern Europeans - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • today’s Europeans descend from three groups who moved into Europe at different stages of history.
  • The first were hunter-gatherers who arrived some 45,000 years ago in Europe. Then came farmers who arrived from the Near East about 8,000 years ago.
  • Finally, a group of nomadic sheepherders from western Russia called the Yamnaya arrived about 4,500 years ago. The authors of the new studies also suggest that the Yamnaya language may have given rise to many of the languages spoken in Europe today.
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  • the new studies were “a major game-changer. To me, it marks a new phase in ancient DNA research.”
  • Until about 9,000 years ago, Europe was home to a genetically distinct population of hunter-gatherers, the researchers found. Then, between 9,000 and 7,000 years ago, the genetic profiles of the inhabitants in some parts of Europe abruptly changed, acquiring DNA from Near Eastern populations.
  • Archaeologists have long known that farming practices spread into Europe at the time from Turkey. But the new evidence shows that it wasn’t just the ideas that spread — the farmers did, too.
  • the Yamnaya, who left behind artifacts on the steppes of western Russia and Ukraine dating from 5,300 to 4,600 years ago. The Yamnaya used horses to manage huge herds of sheep, and followed their livestock across the steppes with wagons full of food and water.
  • “You have groups which are as genetically distinct as Europeans and East Asians. And they’re living side by side for thousands of years.”
  • Between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, however, hunter-gatherer DNA began turning up in the genes of European farmers. “There’s a breakdown of these cultural barriers, and they mix,”
  • About 4,500 years ago, the final piece of Europe’s genetic puzzle fell into place. A new infusion of DNA arrived — one that is still very common in living Europeans, especially in central and northern Europe.
  • The hunter-gatherers didn’t disappear, however. They managed to survive in pockets across Europe between the farming communities.
  • The closest match to this new DNA, both teams of scientists found, comes from skeletons found in Yamnaya graves in western Russia and Ukraine.
  • it was likely that the expansion of Yamnaya into Europe was relatively peaceful. “It wasn’t Attila the Hun coming in and killing everybody,”
  • the most likely scenario was that the Yamnaya “entered into some kind of stable opposition” with the resident Europeans that lasted for a few centuries. But then gradually the barriers between the cultures eroded.
  • the Yamnaya didn’t just expand west into Europe, however. The scientists examined DNA from 4,700-year-old skeletons from a Siberian culture called the Afanasievo. It turns out that they inherited Yamnaya DNA, too.
  • was surprised by the possibility that Yamnaya pushed out over a range of about 4,000 miles. “
  • For decades, linguists have debated how Indo-European got to Europe. Some favor the idea that the original farmers brought Indo-European into Europe from Turkey. Others think the language came from the Russian steppes thousands of years later.
  • he did think the results were consistent with the idea that the Yamnaya brought Indo-European from the steppes to Europe.
  • The eastward expansion of Yamnaya, evident in the genetic findings, also supports the theory, Dr. Willerslev said. Linguists have long puzzled over an Indo-European language once spoken in western China called Tocharian. It is only known from 1,200-year-old manuscripts discovered in ancient desert towns. It is possible that Tocharian was a vestige of the eastern spread of the Yamnaya.
  • the new studies were important, but were still too limited to settle the debate over the origins of Indo-European. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said.
  • Dr. Heggarty speculated instead that early European farmers, the second wave of immigrants, may have brought Indo-European to Europe from the Near East. Then, thousands of years later, the Yamnaya brought the language again to Central Europe.
rachelramirez

Ancient squirrel's nest leads to giant virus discovery - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Ancient squirrel's nest leads to discovery of giant virus
  • The virus has been at rest for 30,000 years about 30 meters deep in the Siberian permafrost. Astrobiologists using it as kind of stand-in for Mars have taken core samples looking for life. Claverie said he stumbled on research that described reviving a plant from a seed that had been buried for 30,000 years.
xaviermcelderry

The state of the climate in 2021 - BBC Future - 0 views

  • The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached record levels in 2020, hitting 417 parts per million in May. The last time CO2 levels exceeded 400 parts per million was around four million years ago, during the Pliocene era, when global temperatures were 2-4C warmer and sea levels were 10-25 metres (33-82 feet) higher than they are now.
  • The past decade was the hottest on record. The year 2020 was more than 1.2C hotter than the average year in the 19th Century. In Europe it was the hottest year ever, while globally 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest. Record temperatures, including 2016, usually coincide with an El Niño event (a large band of warm water that forms in the Pacific Ocean every few years), which results in large-scale warming of ocean surface temperatures. But 2020 was unusual because the world experienced a La Niña event (the reverse of El Niño, with a cooler band of water forming). In other words, without La Niña bringing global temperatures down, 2020 would have been even hotter.
  • Nowhere is that increase in heat more keenly felt than in the Arctic. In June 2020, the temperature reached 38C in eastern Siberia, the hottest ever recorded within the Arctic Circle. The heatwave accelerated the melting of sea ice in the East Siberian and Laptev seas and delayed the usual Arctic freeze by almost two months
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  • The World Economic Forum launched a campaign this year to plant one trillion trees to absorb carbon. While planting trees might help cancel out the last 10 years of CO2 emissions, it cannot solve the climate crisis on its own, according to Waring.
liamhudgings

A Mayor In Norway's Arctic Looks To China To Reinvent His Frontier Town : NPR - 0 views

  • Rune Rafaelsen has a bold plan that could raise the profile of his remote Arctic town — with a little help, he hopes, from China.
  • He is the mayor of Sor-Varanger, a municipality in the far northeast corner of Norway, close to the Russian border. His office is in the small town Kirkenes — population a little over 3,500 — which overlooks the icy gray Barents Sea.
  • "Now you can go from Asia to Europe through the Northern Sea Route.
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  • The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere on the planet. While the melting sea ice has alarmed scientists and residents, newly accessible waterways mean commercial ships are increasingly plowing along polar lanes.
  • A binational working group study concluded in late 2018 that the project, estimated to cost more than $3 billion, will not be "financially feasible."
  • Rafaelsen wants to turn his tiny town into a major logistical hub, including a massive port and train line to Finland.
  • He envisions building a massive new container terminal and a 300-mile railway to the city of Rovaniemi in neighboring Finland, which would key to moving cargo into Western Europe.
  • "Our plan is that you should [have] 10 trains from Kirkenes every day ... and we should handle about 1 million containers [per year]," he says.
  • The Norwegian government drew up a concept study for a mega-port for the area. That idea is on hold amid doubts that there would be enough cargo to warrant the cost.
  • Kirkenes is the first western harbor you meet when you start from Shanghai and go along the Russian sub-Siberian coast,"
  • There has also been pushback from the Sami, an indigenous people who herd reindeer across northern Finland. A rail line could harm their livelihoods and culture, Sami leaders and the working group said
  • The lack of interest and financing have done little to dampen Rafaelsen's enthusiasm.
  • "I have promoted it a lot in China, and the Chinese [have] been here to look at the possibility,"
  • About a year ago, the Chinese government launched an Arctic white paper, considered its first formal articulation of policies for the region. It emphasized the region's strategic economic importance — calling China a "Near-Arctic State" — and elaborated on a plan to include a "Polar Silk Road" in its broad Belt and Road Initiative to build trade links across several continents.
  • In February 2019, the Norwegian town's annual winter festival was themed "The World's Northernmost Chinatown."
  • "People get angry. Now they think Kirkenes should not be Chinese at all. But it's engaged people. That's the best," he says.
  • "The issue here is population, especially in the eastern part of northern Norway," Stokvik says. "We need jobs — we need the youth to stay, not going away."
  • But Thomas Nilsen, a journalist who covers Arctic issues for the Independent Barents Observer, says he doesn't see Kirkenes ever becoming the new Singapore.
sidneybelleroche

Russian troop movements near Ukraine border prompt concern in U.S., Europe - The Washin... - 0 views

  • A renewed buildup of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border has raised concern among some officials in the United States and Europe who are tracking what they consider irregular movements of equipment and personnel on Russia’s western flank.
  • The renewed movements of Russian forces in the area come as the Kremlin embraces a harder line on Ukraine. Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin on down have escalated their rhetoric in recent months, attacking Kyiv’s Western ties and even questioning its sovereignty.
  • The situation also comes as the simmering 7½-year conflict between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region enters a new stage. On Oct. 26, Ukraine’s military confirmed it had used a Turkish-made drone against a position in Donbas, the first time Kyiv has employed the technology in combat, prompting an outcry from Moscow.
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  • According to Kofman, publicly available satellite imagery shows that forces from Russia’s 41st Combined Arms Army, normally based in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, didn’t return to Siberia after the exercises, and instead linked up with other Russian forces near the Ukrainian border.
  • Officials in the United States and Europe began noticing the movements particularly in recent weeks, after Russia concluded a massive joint military exercise with Belarus known as Zapad 2021 on its western flank in mid-September.
  • Relations between Moscow and NATO are especially tense.
  • Putin and other top Russian officials have said the expansion of NATO activities in Ukraine represents a “red line” for Moscow, whereas previously they cited NATO membership for Ukraine as a move they couldn’t abide, Kofman said.
  • Since 2015, when the front lines of the conflict more or less froze in place, the buildups haven’t led to a mass territory-gaining offensive by Russia or the separatist forces it backs.
  • Danilov estimated that the number of Russian troops deployed around the Ukrainian border at 80,000 to 90,000, not including the tens of thousands stationed in Crimea.
  • Putin outlined that view in an article in July, claiming Ukraine was being functionally controlled by Western nations to foment anti-Russian sentiment.
  • Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and now the deputy head of Russia’s security council, called Ukraine a “vassal state” that is “under direct foreign control”
  • Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Putin, accused the United States of building NATO military bases in Ukraine using training centers as a cover.
  • U.S. troops have been training Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine for years, an initiative undertaken by Washington and its NATO allies after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Ukrainian forces also have participated in joint exercises with the United States and its NATO allies. The United States has provided Ukraine with Javelin antitank weaponry but has not taken any active role in fighting.
  • Kofman said Russia this year suddenly invested a large amount of money in developing a ready reserve for its military
  • Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia is “actively spreading fakes about Ukraine allegedly preparing an offensive or other nonsense.
  • The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv warned Friday that Russia had repeatedly deployed howitzer artillery and drones against Ukrainian forces “in direct violation” of a July 2020 cease-fire agreement.
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