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Temperatures in the Arctic continue to heat twice as fast as the rest of the world; that's what the latest US government climate report says. The last five years in the Arctic have been the warmest since records began, in 1900. An eccentric Russian geophysicist warned decades ago that frozen ground, called permafrost, contained enough gas to greenhouse effect to pose a threat to the climate if it were to melt. As we announced for the first time in March, science has mocked the warning of Sergey Zimov, but now that the permafrost is collapsing, the world is listening. Last summer, we traveled to the Siberian Arctic to meet Zimov, who devised a program to save the world in a place that he named for the last Ice Age: the Pleistocene Park.
Our trip lasted three days and our last stop on a geoscientific adventure was an aeronautical fossil, an Antonov from the Soviet era. We approached a Siberia that we had never seen in our imagination, a forest touching the horizon in a country covered with lakes.
It was very far north, even with a Siberian compass – over the Arctic Circle, where the Kolyma fills the eastern Siberian sea.
Fifteen time zones from New York, we found the ghost town becoming expensive. Commercial port in the Soviet era, Cherksy was devastated by the fall of communism, losing 80% of its inhabitants. There are not many reasons to visit unless, like many scientists today, you make your way to the Northeast Science Station to meet its founder, Sergey Zimov 63 years old.
Scott Pelley: Hello.
Sergey Zimov: Hello.
Scott Pelley: I'm Scott.
Sergey Zimov: I am Sergey.
Scott Pelley: Nice to see you, Sergey.
He welcomed us in the summer, while fireweed had a few weeks of liberation. But 40 Siberian winters remained indelible on Zimov's face, the price of loneliness for a geophysicist who wanted to be away from his communist bosses.
Scott Pelley: When people hear the word, Siberia, they think of exile. But it seems to me that exile is exactly what you had in mind.
Sergey Zimov: Yes, only one problem, so long winter.
Scott Pelley: The winter is long?
Sergey Zimov: Yes.
The winters are long, but not so cold. This soil was once so cold that humanity has dubbed it "permafrost". But in the 1990s, Zimov noticed that it was not so permanent.
Sergey Zimov: frozen ground. Do you hear?
Scott Pelley: Yeah.
Sergey Zimov: It's the roof of permafrost.
He remembers that his shovel would not bite on the frozen surface. But now it is down more than six feet.
Sergey Zimov: In the past, all our soil, which had been melted in the summer, was freezing everywhere and this usually happened in November-December. Now, throughout the winter, he has not froze.
Scott Pelley: What does that tell you?
Sergey Zimov: This means that the permafrost is melting.
This is a warning for the whole world because the permafrost organic matter, plants and animals, has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. In thaw, microbes consume this organic matter and release carbon dioxide and methane, greenhouse gases that contribute to a warmer climate.
Scott Pelley: We just got that out of the hole and it burns my fingers, it's so cold.
Sergey Zimov: Yes, the soil with water and water is ice. In five minutes, it will melt.
Several years ago, Zimov calculated that permafrost contains enough carbon to threaten the world. But great science has given a cold idea to this idea, partly because of Zimov himself. It suffers Siberian winters when most Russians head south. He eats a refreshing vodka from time to time, smokes like a Soviet steel mill, and often goes to bed to think.
Max Holmes: I sometimes describe it as somewhere between a fool and a genius.
Max Holmes is a climate scientist and deputy director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. He told us that Zimov's key finding was that Siberian permafrost contained much more carbon than anyone knew.
Scott Pelley: When Zimov made this observation, he was unable to publish his articles in scientific journals.
Max Holmes: It may take some time before publishing articles that go against conventional wisdom.
But science is becoming familiar with Zimov's theory and he is now publishing dozens of articles in scientific journals. Max Holmes made several visits to Zimov station.
Max Holmes: Estimates of the amount of carbon trapped in permafrost are increasing. And most of us probably thought of the top counter.
Scott Pelley: The three upper feet of the ground.
Max Holmes: Yes, the top three feet, that's right. If you go down much deeper, the carbon content is very low. But what is special about this area where Zimov is the carbon content of the permafrost is extending to a much greater depth and, as a result, a huge amount of carbon is stuck there.
Scientists estimate that there is more greenhouse gas in permafrost than in the rest of the oil, natural gas and coal. There is no consensus on how much could be released.
Scott Pelley: How deep are we right now?
Nikita Zimov: At the moment, we are ten meters away.
Scott Pelley: So about 30 feet?
Nikita Zimov: Yes, yes, yes.
Ten times deeper than expected, we discovered the remains of plants and microbes from the Ice Age with Zimov's lead collaborator, his son, Nikita.
Nikita Zimov: This is a carbon delayed bomb.
Scott Pelley: A carbon bomb?
Nikita Zimov: Yes.
Nikita Zimov grew up here with her father and is reasonably headed south to go to university, leaving behind the old man and the river. But Nikita's plan to be a mathematician faded when Sergey asked his son to come back to see what he had seen. A few hours from the research station, a vast subsidence of permafrost, a kind of slippery landslide, called Duvanny Yar. Geology is a slow science, but here it is almost a spectator sport. Woolly extinct mammoth bones are melting after more than 12,000 years.
Stephan Gruber
The collapse of frozen earth occurs in much of the Arctic, including Alaska. 25% of the northern hemisphere is made up of permafrost.
The Zimovs have a theory, many would say a crazy idea, to defuse the carbon bomb. They want to cool the permafrost by bringing part of Siberia back to the ice age, or at least what it looked like in the Pleistocene era.
Scott Pelley: What would we see if we stood on this hill in the Pleistocene era?
Sergey Zimov: No trees. It looks like meadows and savanna. And you will see about 1,000 mammoths, about 5,000 bison. About maybe 10,000 horses around this place and also lions.
Scott Pelley: Lions?
Sergey Zimov: Yes. There was, the main predator was lions here.
Sergey Zimov told us that when man became the main predator, the woolly mammoth and other large pastures were hunted to extinction. Forests have replaced grasslands, which has made Siberia vulnerable to global warming. Because trees retain more heat than the grass. And winter temperatures below 40 can not freeze permafrost if there are no herds of animals to trample the insulating snow.
As a demonstration project called the Pleistocene Park, Nikita Zimov fells trees over an area of 90 km 2 and replenishes the large pastures. The Zimov believe that the return of the earth to its ice age will cool the permafrost, even in a warming world.
Scott Pelley: You're trying to bring the animals back now. How can you do that?
Sergey Zimov: Physically, do you mean? Or morally? What– or financially?
Scott Pelley: All three, but let's start with physically, what do you need? Hundreds of thousands, millions of these animals?
Nikita Zimov: You have to start with something. Second, you have to prove to people that the concept works. And to prove that the concept works, you– for a lot of things, you do not need millions of animals.
Scott Pelley: You mentioned the moral problem of bringing animals here. What do you mean? I mean, some people say you play God.
Sergey Zimov: You know, I think it's not me who plays God. It was our ancestors who were playing God 15,000 years ago. Humans have come and reduced the number of animals in the world. And we're just trying to … I do not know, get it back.
It is there that the Zimov experience becomes more crazy. What they need, it's the largest tree grinder of the last 20,000 years. And they are surrounded by evidence of a woolly mammoth once abundant.
Scott Pelley: It's amazing.
Sergey Zimov: This is a young woman.
Scott Pelley: Young mammoth? It weighs at least 20, 25 pounds.
Scott Pelley: Do you need a woolly mammoth to bring all this back into the park?
Nikita Zimov: It's like, do you need your right arm to live and do your job? No, you do not need it, but with your arm you will do it better. So even with mammoth.
Today, you may find a woolly mammoth in Boston, Massachusetts, specifically in the Harvard geneticist's laboratory, George Church.
Scott Pelley: Sergey is hoping you'll give him a mammoth. Can you do that?
George Church: I think he hopes to deliver an animal very similar to those who wander there. We need cold-weather elephants. That's what he would like.
Church is another scientist who made the trip to Zimov's world. He returned to his renowned genetics laboratory with mammoth bones.
George Church: If you look at the 23 elephant genomes, you will find that there is a lot of miscegenation among the different species. So, in a way, we're just recreating a hybrid that could easily have existed.
Scott Pelley: When do you imagine being able to tow a truck and deliver that creature to the Pleistocene Park?
George Church: I would say in probably five years we will know if we can get it to work for mice, and maybe pigs and elephants. And then, if we can get embryos until the end of the lab, it's probably a decade.
The Zimovs did not convince everyone of climatology. Critics say they do not have long-term permafrost temperature records and that their work is limited to a relatively small area.
Scott Pelley: You know, in the untrained eye, a person could come out of a meeting with Sergey thinking that he is a crack.
Max Holmes: Yes, that's right, he plays the role in a way.
Scott Pelley: But as a climatologist, how do you evaluate it?
Max Holmes: I think he's usually right. He certainly has controversial ideas. And I think a lot of them end up being supported over time.
Scott Pelley: What do you think of his Pleistocene park concept?
Max Holmes: A fascinating theory. I am fascinated by the science that can be done to determine if it is correct. I'm glad he's pursuing that. We must think of solutions.
The Zimovs have little money for their big idea. The government donated the land. And their income comes from the rent they charge to guest scientists for the research station. Their science is on the cutting edge with a very long chronology.
Scott Pelley: Sergey, you have dedicated your life to that. But I wonder why you thought it was important that Nikita devote her life to it.
Sergey Zimov: Why is it important? Hmm. Our experience is a long term experience. Decades. Decades.
Scott Pelley: Will it take decades?
Sergey Zimov: Yes. And that is also, we think of my grandchildren.
They had intriguing results at the beginning of the Pleistocene Park. The data shows that permafrost is getting colder when the trees that hold the heat have been cut. This weighs a little more on the genius side of the mad scale and perhaps on early evidence that the resurrection of the future of the world may depend on the burial of Siberia's past.
New animals have arrived at the park since the release of our story in March. Not mammoths, but a dozen Danish bison. It took Nikita Zimov and her crew more than a month to take them by land and water to their new home.
More information on the Pleistocene park.
Produced by Henry Schuster. Associate Producers Rachael Morehouse and Sarah Turcotte
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