The 2084 Report by James Lawrence Powell

Author:James Lawrence Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2020-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

IMPERMANENT FROST

Today I speak with Yekaterina Zimova at her grandson’s home in Vladivostok. Born in the year 2000, Zimova is the daughter of Nikita Zimov and the granddaughter of Sergey Aphanasievich Zimov, a great Russian scientist and would-be habitat restorer during the first half of the century.

Katya Nikitovna, if I may so address you, tell me about yourself and your illustrious forefathers.

Я счастлив and with that I will go on in English. I used to speak it fluently when my father and grandfather worked with American and British scientists in the old days, but now I am out of practice. I will see how well I can do.

My grandfather Sergey Aphanasievich was in the first years of the century thought to be the top scientist in our country, one of the best in the world. This was not only because of his intellect but also because he studied permafrost, which would turn out not to be so permanent and which contributed far more to глобальное потепление, your global warming, than other scientists had predicted.

In 1977, Sergey Aphanasievich helped establish the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii as a research institute of the Russian Academy. This small Siberian town where I was born lies at 69° North, above the Arctic Circle, at the mouth of the Kolyma River about 93 miles [150 km] south of the Arctic Ocean. The mission of the center was to study the permafrost, the methane gas it gave off, and its effect on the ecosystem. But before I go into that I need to tell you about another project for which he really became famous, the Pleistocene Park.

My grandfather and father wanted to solve one of the biggest mysteries of science: what caused the woolly mammoth and the other large plant-eaters to disappear at the end of the last ice age? Most Siberian scientists thought the climate had warmed up and changed grasslands to tundra—it is the same word in both our languages—which did not provide enough food to keep the big animals alive. My granddad thought this was just backward, that the trampling and manure from large herds would have turned the tundra into grassland. That would have left human hunters as the only way to explain the extinction. But if the extinction was due to overhunting and not climate change, it might be possible to reestablish large mammals on the tundra. The effort to do so became known as Pleistocene Park. My grandfather established a wildlife preserve and tried to stock it with wild bison, moose, elk, and so on, captured alive or bought as calves. When he died, my father carried on the work.

But it was the other line of research, the permafrost studies, that turned out to be the most important.

Yes, it was. Of course, I was brought up with scientists and even though I did not become one, I can explain about permafrost. They say it occurs when the temperature of the top of the ground is at or below freezing for at least two years.

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