How a scientist living in the Far East of Russia wants to save the Earth. Pastures 12,000 years ago would be a solution

A researcher living in the icy corner of eastern Russia with his wife and son has a rare ambition. You want to slow down the rate at which permafrost, the layer of soil responsible for retaining a large amount of carbon dioxide, thaws.

Thus, by repopulating the area with ruminants, they want to recreate the Pleistocene environment, it was the glacier that ended 12,000 years ago, says The Economist, cited by Digi 24.

Sergei Zimov, whose name comes from the Russian word “winter”, lives with his wife, Galina, in a simple wooden house near Chersky, on the other end of Russia, further north from Reykjavik and Mayo east from Tokyo. At home, the ivory tusks of a mammoth are scattered on the bedroom floor.

This is an unfavorable land for human life, where temperatures drop below minus 50 degrees Celsius in winter and mosquitoes cover the sky in summer.

In the Soviet era, few people traveled along the Kolyma River on their own initiative. The region had a reputation for being one of the coldest and hardest gulags. Until the Zimovs moved there in the 1980s, the prisons closed, but the ice remained. In the early years they lived without electricity, using only kerosene lamps and drinking water from the river. Chersky’s isolated land had its benefits. “We feel very free here,” says Galina, away from the eyes of the Communist Party.

Using his degree in geophysics and critical thinking, Zimov is a co-founder of the Northeast Science Station for Arctic Research, where he studies the far north.

In the mid-1980s, he predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse. Stocked up. “When there is a drought, the furthest reaches of the river dry up first,” he explains. He also boasts other premonitions, such as the fall in the price of oil in 2014. He tells everyone who listens to him to invest in gold.

Zimov is more afraid of an ecological apocalypse. For more than 20 years, he and his son, Nikita, inhabited an area of ​​160 square kilometers, which they called the Pleistocene Park, with yaks, horses, sheep, oxen and other ruminants. Zimov believes that they will uproot and trample the shrubs, lichens and larches that cover the area, giving way to grasslands that were widespread in the Pleistocene, the glacial period that began 2.6 million years ago and ended 12,000 years ago.

He argues that this will slow down the thawing of permafrost, a process that leads to the release of greenhouse gases that accelerate climate change. “I’m building an ark,” he says, speaking of his project in great metaphorical terms, but without a trace of irony.

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