Prospecting for mammoth
Although the thawing of these ancient remains raises the threat of terrifying consequences, it is, for some, the bright side of climate change.
“The thawing of the permafrost has a very good effect. The mammoth bone comes out and brings us money,” said Yevgeny Konstantinov, a newspaper editor in the Arctic town of Saskylakh. “Everyone rides Jeeps now.”
In recent years, demand from China has created a booming market for mammoth ivory. People in Yakutia collected almost 80 tons in 2017, according to official figures — a likely undercount, experts say. A Yakutia official recently estimated annual sales to be as high as $63 million.
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. People involved in the business, which isn’t entirely legal, said some tusk prospectors have deployed underwater cameras and scuba gear.
“You get bit once, you catch the bug. It’s like a gold rush,” said Alexey Sivtsev, a prospector in Zyryanka who said he is licensed to collect tusks. 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.
According to Sakha tradition, tusk hunting violates the sacred ground and brings bad tidings. Some Siberians worry that it also draws young people into an underworld linked to organized crime.
“Since all this is connected to criminality, I’m worried that this mafia, as we call it, is getting a basis for existing in our villages,” said Vyacheslav Shadrin, who studies northern indigenous peoples at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk.
Konstantin Gusev, a hunter in Nelemnoye, is still waiting for his mammoth payday.
Once, he found the tusk of an ancient woolly rhinoceros but threw it away. He later learned that such a find sells for $7,000 a pound, making it among the most valuable animal remains buried underground.
Gusev now has his eye on a strip of riverbank where he found a mammoth tooth. He invested in a water pump and hose to try to uncover what’s underneath.
Vanda Ignatyeva, a Yakutsk sociologist, said climate change is leaving people with few choices. “They have to somehow support and feed their families.”
‘Trying to survive’
The mammoths aren’t enough to keep Gusev in the countryside, however. The hunter said he is moving to Yakutsk to look for other kinds of work.
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.
“Something is changing,” Gusev said. “People are sitting around, trying to survive.”
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.
“We’re already seeing the phenomenon of climate refugees,” Shadrin said.
But “it’s not like anyone is waiting for them here” in the city, he said. “No one is ready to help them immediately. . . . They’re breaking away, becoming marginals.”
And Yakutsk offers no escape from the warming climate.
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.
“The cold is our protection,” Yakutsk Mayor Sardana Avksentyeva said. “This isn’t a man-made catastrophe yet, but it’ll be unavoidable if things continue at this pace.”
An international team of scientists, led by Dmitry A. Streletskiy at George Washington University, estimated in 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.
But people here are used to adapting. They survived the forced collectivization of the early Soviet Union. Gulag prisoners taught them to grow potatoes. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the state farms closed, they shifted to a greater reliance on hunting and fishing.
Now, Anatoly Sleptsov, 61, is once again embracing change.
The pastures of the village where he used to live have turned into swamps and lakes. So he moved to firmer ground outside Zyryanka, where he’s leveraging climate change to his advantage.
Though Sleptsov’s attempt to create an Israeli-style kibbutz failed, he figures the region can profit by marketing Omega 3 fatty acids extracted from its fish.
Meanwhile, his potatoes are flowering earlier. And this year, he started growing strawberries.
“Next thing,” he said, “we’ll have watermelon.”