Is time running out for the tundra?
It’s autumn on the tundra and the chill breeze that will bring the first snows of the season any day now rustles the branches of a lone larch tree, triggering a silent shower of fine golden needles.
In the distance, a small herd of reindeer is driven towards the silhouettes of four chums (teepee-like constructions), which punctuate the horizon like jagged teeth. From the back of a narrow wooden sled drawn by four reindeer, a figure holding a long pole in one hand gestures to a small black dog, which darts willingly across the boggy landscape with astonishing speed.
One of the world’s last remaining wildernesses, the Yamal Peninsula protrudes like a giant thumb into the Arctic Circle, squeezed between the icy Kara Sea and the vast Gulf of Ob. As I fly by helicopter from Salekhard, the capital of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region, to the base of the peninsula, the terrain below resembles a saturated, mouldy sponge – hues of green, gold and brown are interspersed with countless perfectly circular lakes, themselves connected by hundreds of streams and rivulets that weave mesmerising patterns among them.
For more than a thousand years, the indigenous Nenets people have made this 120,000-square-kilometre peninsula their home, moving across the vast bog- and lake-dotted tundra with apparent ease, using survival techniques that have changed very little in that time. In summer, they retreat to the north to avoid the region’s fierce mosquitoes, gradually returning south for the winter to cross the frozen delta of the mighty Ob River, Russia’s fourth-longest. Once the crossing has been made, the reindeer give birth in the forests around Nadym, a town 300 kilometres east of Salekhard.
But as global temperatures rise, the Yamal is under increasing strain, and this ancient pattern of transhumance is being disrupted. The permafrost beneath the tundra is thawing, leading to collapsed soil systems and river banks. This not only makes travel more difficult outside of the frozen winter, but has also depleted the foraging grounds for the reindeer, or rendered them inaccessible.
Perched on the edge of a simple wooden sled in his camp on a gentle ridge beside a lake, 25 kilometres from the town of Yar-Sale, 45-year-old herder Jakov Yaptik describes how the tundra has changed. ‘About ten years ago, the seasons began to be delayed,’ he says. ‘Now winter comes one month later, so we have to wait longer at the banks of the Ob, waiting for it to freeze over. This has had a bad effect on the reindeer, because they need to cross the river to give birth, and if we stay in one area too long, there is not enough food.’
When winter does finally arrive, it isn’t as harsh. ‘It often used to reach between –50°C and –52°C in the depths of winter,’ says another herder, Braguillup Okotetto. ‘But now it’s typically between –30°C and –35°C.’
‘Obviously we prefer –30°C,’ says Yaptik. ‘But the changes are not good for the reindeer, and ultimately, what is good for the reindeer is good for us.’
The Nenets cite other changes they’ve witnessed during their annual migration. In spring, it’s much more difficult to walk and use the sleds due to the increase in mud, and there are fewer mosquitoes. However, the increasingly hot summers have brought gadflies, which attack anything unfortunate enough to find itself out in the open.
Unfrozen north
Stretching in a thick band from Murmansk near Finland to the far eastern region of Chukotka near Alaska, permafrost – permanently frozen soil, sediment or rock where temperatures below 0°C have persisted for at least two consecutive years – accounts for around 60 per cent of Russia. Siberia has some of the world’s thickest permafrost, reaching up to 1,400 metres thick in places.
‘Permafrost is one of the great natural phenomena,’ says Fedor Romanenko of Moscow State University, a geographer specialising in tundra landscapes. ‘In some places, it’s around one million years old, and without it, the planet would be poorer. It contains a lot of gases, including greenhouse gases. As soon as these gases are absorbed and accumulated [by the plants and soils], they become fixed and locked inside the frozen conditions.’
Permafrost occupies a quarter of the Earth’s land area and its role in regulating climate has been recognised for some time. Recent research published in Ecological Monographs has shown that the Arctic has been a carbon sink since the end of the last ice age. And a paper published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies argues that the bogs of western Siberia are ‘one of the “gold keys” to regulating the process of global warming’.
Scientists say that, should the permafrost thaw, it could accelerate global climate change by unlocking billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane. As temperatures rise, microbes locked within the permafrost begin to break down organic matter in the upper layers, releasing the gases. Methane is 23 times more efficient than CO2 at trapping solar heat over a 100-year period, says Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy unit at Greenpeace Russia, and in some areas, it’s already possible to see methane bubbling to the surface of lakes.
‘The average temperature of permafrost is growing everywhere,’ says Chuprov. ‘An estimated 1.6 trillion tonnes of carbon is stored in permafrost throughout the world. And according to some research, one trillion tonnes is concentrated in the upper layers, where there is more organic material. As a comparison, permafrost holds more than double the amount of carbon than there is in the atmosphere.’
However, Romanenko is more cautious about the link between the permafrost and global warming. ‘Permafrost has a life of its own and is very complex,’ he says. ‘We need to know more about permafrost in northwestern Siberia, and indeed the rest of the Arctic region, before we can make such claims.’
Watching the weather
While the scientific community may be divided on the impact that the thawing of Siberia’s permafrost will have on climate change, it’s difficult to ignore the effect that the warming climate is having on the region. The Kara Sea is chewing off as much as six metres of the Yamal coastline a year, due to a reduction in seasonal sea ice, which would usually act as a buffer against the harsh winter storms. At Marresale on the Kara Sea coast, 500 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, technicians at a state-run meteorological station have been monitoring the local sea ice and climatic conditions for the past century.
The weather here is bitterly cold, intensified by brisk onshore winds. Dilapidated buildings surrounding the meteorological station creak eerily, while a rusty disused wind turbine rotates noisily, casting a long shadow over the empty oil drums and machinery parts – relics from the Soviet era – strewn all around.
Originally from Kazakhstan, Alexander Pavlovitch Chikmaryov has been the head of this remote Arctic station for the past six years. During that time, he says, the coast there has eroded by at least two metres. He also describes how flocks of migrating geese have started to arrive later and that polar bears have made more frequent appearances in search of food, despite this being a long way south of their typical northern Arctic haunts.
‘We saw a polar bear in August just ten metres from the house,’ says Lyudmila Chikmaryov, Alexander’s wife and the station’s assistant technician. ‘It was looking in the bins for food. We heard that one polar bear attacked and scalped a technician in Franz Josef Land.’
As she checks a sunlight recorder fitted to the roof of the hut in which they live, Lyudmila continues: ‘The thickness of the sea ice this year reached a maximum of 117 centimetres, while the year before it was 164 centimetres. We’ve seen winter temperatures go up, too, from lows of –50°C in 1914, when the station was founded, to –40°C today.’
Despite this evidence, Alexander doesn’t believe Russia is under threat from global warming. ‘It’s rubbish,’ he says, perhaps echoing scepticism felt by many Russians. ‘Global warming is something invented by people who spend far too much time indoors.’
But if this region continues to warm, scientists argue that Yamal could become an inaccessible mire, and the Nenets traditional culture could be confined to the history books. ‘If the active layer of permafrost, which melts seasonally, reaches a certain depth, then thermokarst processes will accelerate [leading to an increase in lakes], and the permanent ancient ice, which is typically at a depth of around 40 metres in Yamal, will degrade and cause the landscape to erode very quickly,’ says Romanenko. ‘If this layer disappears and is destroyed, the landscape will collapse and become inundated – like a giant swampland.’
In the Nenets’ native tongue, Yamal means ‘the end of the Earth’ or ‘world’s end’, referring to its remote geographical location. But when you come to this part of the world and consider the grave threats it faces, its meaning takes on a different and more bleak connotation, one of which the Nenets herders themselves are all too aware.
‘We are really concerned that we won’t be able to herd so many reindeer if our movement continues to be restricted by mud and later winters,’ says Okotetto. ‘Maybe we can’t herd anymore. If we are moved away from our beloved tundra, we won’t know what to do.’
Russia's gas powerhouse
Adding to the complexity of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region and the concerns of the Nenets people is the presence beneath the Yamal Peninsula of what are believed to be the world’s largest gas reserves – estimated at some 12 trillion cubic metres. They could even contain as much as 50 trillion cubic metres – enough to supply Europe for decades.
Campaigners fear that large-scale gas exploration could not only threaten the peninsula’s ecology, but also further disrupt the Nenets’ traditional migration routes or even restrict their passage. However, during a visit to Yamal last September, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin described Yamal and the surrounding area as the mainstay of Russian gas production and export strategy in the years ahead, and invited international companies to come and participate in its exploitation.
But this is a tough environment for development, and gas companies will have to overcome freezing temperatures, strong winds, frequent storms, the difficulties of transporting the gas to distant markets, and the technical challenges associated with building on top of the increasingly unpredictable permafrost. Numerous Arctic settlements have long suffered from severe subsidence, buckled railways and degrading roads, and one pipeline section, near Urengoy, was reportedly lifted by 1.5 metres during a single year.
March 2010
In the distance, a small herd of reindeer is driven towards the silhouettes of four chums (teepee-like constructions), which punctuate the horizon like jagged teeth. From the back of a narrow wooden sled drawn by four reindeer, a figure holding a long pole in one hand gestures to a small black dog, which darts willingly across the boggy landscape with astonishing speed.
One of the world’s last remaining wildernesses, the Yamal Peninsula protrudes like a giant thumb into the Arctic Circle, squeezed between the icy Kara Sea and the vast Gulf of Ob. As I fly by helicopter from Salekhard, the capital of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region, to the base of the peninsula, the terrain below resembles a saturated, mouldy sponge – hues of green, gold and brown are interspersed with countless perfectly circular lakes, themselves connected by hundreds of streams and rivulets that weave mesmerising patterns among them.
For more than a thousand years, the indigenous Nenets people have made this 120,000-square-kilometre peninsula their home, moving across the vast bog- and lake-dotted tundra with apparent ease, using survival techniques that have changed very little in that time. In summer, they retreat to the north to avoid the region’s fierce mosquitoes, gradually returning south for the winter to cross the frozen delta of the mighty Ob River, Russia’s fourth-longest. Once the crossing has been made, the reindeer give birth in the forests around Nadym, a town 300 kilometres east of Salekhard.
But as global temperatures rise, the Yamal is under increasing strain, and this ancient pattern of transhumance is being disrupted. The permafrost beneath the tundra is thawing, leading to collapsed soil systems and river banks. This not only makes travel more difficult outside of the frozen winter, but has also depleted the foraging grounds for the reindeer, or rendered them inaccessible.
Perched on the edge of a simple wooden sled in his camp on a gentle ridge beside a lake, 25 kilometres from the town of Yar-Sale, 45-year-old herder Jakov Yaptik describes how the tundra has changed. ‘About ten years ago, the seasons began to be delayed,’ he says. ‘Now winter comes one month later, so we have to wait longer at the banks of the Ob, waiting for it to freeze over. This has had a bad effect on the reindeer, because they need to cross the river to give birth, and if we stay in one area too long, there is not enough food.’
When winter does finally arrive, it isn’t as harsh. ‘It often used to reach between –50°C and –52°C in the depths of winter,’ says another herder, Braguillup Okotetto. ‘But now it’s typically between –30°C and –35°C.’
‘Obviously we prefer –30°C,’ says Yaptik. ‘But the changes are not good for the reindeer, and ultimately, what is good for the reindeer is good for us.’
The Nenets cite other changes they’ve witnessed during their annual migration. In spring, it’s much more difficult to walk and use the sleds due to the increase in mud, and there are fewer mosquitoes. However, the increasingly hot summers have brought gadflies, which attack anything unfortunate enough to find itself out in the open.
Unfrozen north
Stretching in a thick band from Murmansk near Finland to the far eastern region of Chukotka near Alaska, permafrost – permanently frozen soil, sediment or rock where temperatures below 0°C have persisted for at least two consecutive years – accounts for around 60 per cent of Russia. Siberia has some of the world’s thickest permafrost, reaching up to 1,400 metres thick in places.
‘Permafrost is one of the great natural phenomena,’ says Fedor Romanenko of Moscow State University, a geographer specialising in tundra landscapes. ‘In some places, it’s around one million years old, and without it, the planet would be poorer. It contains a lot of gases, including greenhouse gases. As soon as these gases are absorbed and accumulated [by the plants and soils], they become fixed and locked inside the frozen conditions.’
Permafrost occupies a quarter of the Earth’s land area and its role in regulating climate has been recognised for some time. Recent research published in Ecological Monographs has shown that the Arctic has been a carbon sink since the end of the last ice age. And a paper published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies argues that the bogs of western Siberia are ‘one of the “gold keys” to regulating the process of global warming’.
Scientists say that, should the permafrost thaw, it could accelerate global climate change by unlocking billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane. As temperatures rise, microbes locked within the permafrost begin to break down organic matter in the upper layers, releasing the gases. Methane is 23 times more efficient than CO2 at trapping solar heat over a 100-year period, says Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy unit at Greenpeace Russia, and in some areas, it’s already possible to see methane bubbling to the surface of lakes.
‘The average temperature of permafrost is growing everywhere,’ says Chuprov. ‘An estimated 1.6 trillion tonnes of carbon is stored in permafrost throughout the world. And according to some research, one trillion tonnes is concentrated in the upper layers, where there is more organic material. As a comparison, permafrost holds more than double the amount of carbon than there is in the atmosphere.’
However, Romanenko is more cautious about the link between the permafrost and global warming. ‘Permafrost has a life of its own and is very complex,’ he says. ‘We need to know more about permafrost in northwestern Siberia, and indeed the rest of the Arctic region, before we can make such claims.’
Watching the weather
While the scientific community may be divided on the impact that the thawing of Siberia’s permafrost will have on climate change, it’s difficult to ignore the effect that the warming climate is having on the region. The Kara Sea is chewing off as much as six metres of the Yamal coastline a year, due to a reduction in seasonal sea ice, which would usually act as a buffer against the harsh winter storms. At Marresale on the Kara Sea coast, 500 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, technicians at a state-run meteorological station have been monitoring the local sea ice and climatic conditions for the past century.
The weather here is bitterly cold, intensified by brisk onshore winds. Dilapidated buildings surrounding the meteorological station creak eerily, while a rusty disused wind turbine rotates noisily, casting a long shadow over the empty oil drums and machinery parts – relics from the Soviet era – strewn all around.
Originally from Kazakhstan, Alexander Pavlovitch Chikmaryov has been the head of this remote Arctic station for the past six years. During that time, he says, the coast there has eroded by at least two metres. He also describes how flocks of migrating geese have started to arrive later and that polar bears have made more frequent appearances in search of food, despite this being a long way south of their typical northern Arctic haunts.
‘We saw a polar bear in August just ten metres from the house,’ says Lyudmila Chikmaryov, Alexander’s wife and the station’s assistant technician. ‘It was looking in the bins for food. We heard that one polar bear attacked and scalped a technician in Franz Josef Land.’
As she checks a sunlight recorder fitted to the roof of the hut in which they live, Lyudmila continues: ‘The thickness of the sea ice this year reached a maximum of 117 centimetres, while the year before it was 164 centimetres. We’ve seen winter temperatures go up, too, from lows of –50°C in 1914, when the station was founded, to –40°C today.’
Despite this evidence, Alexander doesn’t believe Russia is under threat from global warming. ‘It’s rubbish,’ he says, perhaps echoing scepticism felt by many Russians. ‘Global warming is something invented by people who spend far too much time indoors.’
But if this region continues to warm, scientists argue that Yamal could become an inaccessible mire, and the Nenets traditional culture could be confined to the history books. ‘If the active layer of permafrost, which melts seasonally, reaches a certain depth, then thermokarst processes will accelerate [leading to an increase in lakes], and the permanent ancient ice, which is typically at a depth of around 40 metres in Yamal, will degrade and cause the landscape to erode very quickly,’ says Romanenko. ‘If this layer disappears and is destroyed, the landscape will collapse and become inundated – like a giant swampland.’
In the Nenets’ native tongue, Yamal means ‘the end of the Earth’ or ‘world’s end’, referring to its remote geographical location. But when you come to this part of the world and consider the grave threats it faces, its meaning takes on a different and more bleak connotation, one of which the Nenets herders themselves are all too aware.
‘We are really concerned that we won’t be able to herd so many reindeer if our movement continues to be restricted by mud and later winters,’ says Okotetto. ‘Maybe we can’t herd anymore. If we are moved away from our beloved tundra, we won’t know what to do.’
Russia's gas powerhouse
Adding to the complexity of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Region and the concerns of the Nenets people is the presence beneath the Yamal Peninsula of what are believed to be the world’s largest gas reserves – estimated at some 12 trillion cubic metres. They could even contain as much as 50 trillion cubic metres – enough to supply Europe for decades.
Campaigners fear that large-scale gas exploration could not only threaten the peninsula’s ecology, but also further disrupt the Nenets’ traditional migration routes or even restrict their passage. However, during a visit to Yamal last September, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin described Yamal and the surrounding area as the mainstay of Russian gas production and export strategy in the years ahead, and invited international companies to come and participate in its exploitation.
But this is a tough environment for development, and gas companies will have to overcome freezing temperatures, strong winds, frequent storms, the difficulties of transporting the gas to distant markets, and the technical challenges associated with building on top of the increasingly unpredictable permafrost. Numerous Arctic settlements have long suffered from severe subsidence, buckled railways and degrading roads, and one pipeline section, near Urengoy, was reportedly lifted by 1.5 metres during a single year.
March 2010
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