[THS] Siberia's warming permafrost releasing methane

[Peter Webster]

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/050508EA.shtml

Freezing to Show Warming Trend
    By Alex Rodriguez
    The Chicago Tribune

    Monday 05 May 2008

    Though dismissed in Russia, scientist's climate research in remote Siberia
is heating up discussions in the West.

    Chersky, Russia - Sergei Zimov waded through knee-deep snow to reach
a frozen lake where so much methane belches out of the melting
permafrost that it spews from the ice like small geysers.

    In the frigid twilight, the Russian scientist struck a match to make a jet of
the greenhouse gas visible. The sudden plume of fire threw him backward.
Zimov stood up, brushed the snow off his parka and beamed.

    "Sometimes a big explosion happens, because the gas comes out like a
bomb," Zimov said. "There are a million lakes like this in northern Siberia."

    In a country where many scientists scoff at the existence of global
warming, Zimov has been waging a lonely campaign to warn the world
about Russia's melting permafrost and its nexus with climate change. His
laboratory is the vast expanse of tundra and larch forest along the East
Siberian Sea, an icy corner of the world that Zimov has scrutinized almost
entirely on his own for 28 years.

    Far from the archetypal scientist, the beefy, 53-year-old Russian with a
mound of gray-brown hair and piercing blue eyes reigns over his patch of
Siberia not with pipette and beaker, but with the swagger of a Cossack and
an encyclopedic knowledge of his surroundings.

    Kitchen conversations with visiting scientists about the region's geology
are regularly interrupted by rounds of vodka shots. He doesn't touch
computers and never wears a watch. If he reads science literature, "it's
something a friend sends me or something I got at a forum."

    "How I check e-mail? I sit in my chair and my wife reads me e-mail,"
Zimov said.

    While his research has gone largely ignored by Russia's scientific
community, it's turning heads in the West.

    American science journals have published his findings, and grants from
the National Science Foundation and the Open Society Institute (Soros
Foundation-Russia) fund much of his work.

    Among Zimov's findings: The release of greenhouse gases - particularly
methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide -
from thawing permafrost underneath Siberian lakes could accelerate global
warming and represents an especially worrisome trend in the battle to slow
climate change.

    "He clearly knows what he's doing," said Thomas Grenfell, a University of
Washington professor who along with colleague Stephen Warren recently
carried out their own climate fieldwork at Zimov's station. "Everyone is
worried about global warming, and this is one of the places where you
would notice things most strongly."

    Stark Evidence

    Few places in the world can provide stark evidence of global warming
like the peat bogs, lakes and woodlands that stretch eight time zones along
Russia's north Siberian coastline.

    Melting permafrost awakens dormant microbes that devour thousands of
tons of organic carbon, creating methane as a byproduct if no oxygen is
present. Subsoil layers of ice also are melting, leaving dips and domes
across the landscape and turning roads into mogul runs.

    Few places in the world are as harsh and remote as Chersky, a
ramshackle cluster of dilapidated Soviet-era apartment buildings and scrap
metal yards 93 miles south of the Arctic Ocean. Chersky's winters subject
locals to three months of darkness and temperatures as low as 50 degrees
below zero. Summers bring on swarms of mosquitoes. Everything from
potatoes to snowmobile parts must be shipped in by air.

    Zimov said he cannot think of any place he would rather be.

    "It doesn't matter where I sleep - I sleep on the bed. Where this bed is
located doesn't matter," he said. "If it's too cold, I work on papers. If it's
good weather, I work in the field. If you've got a good car and good
clothes, you'll be fine here."

    In 1980, Zimov was a 25-year-old scientist drawn to the study of
permafrost when he began building his research station in Chersky, back
then a bustling Soviet seaport just south of the mouth of the Kolyma River.
The science lured him, but so did the freedom that came with being so far
from Moscow's grasp. He moved his family there and never looked back.

    "Absolutely Free Life"

    "We lived without electricity, which meant no television and no
communist propaganda," Zimov said. "It was beautiful. It was an absolutely
free life."

    Like the rest of Russia, Zimov and his wife, Galina, scraped by in the
decade after the Soviet collapse in 1991, enduring months when paychecks
never arrived and relying on what they could hunt, fish and grow in their
greenhouses. Today, millions of dollars in grants from the West and from
the Russian Science Foundation have turned Zimov's station into a hive of
science.

    The money has enabled Zimov to amass ample infrastructure to
scrutinize every facet of the permafrost environment: data collection towers
that measure the release of carbon dioxide and methane from the soil, bore
holes to measure changes in permafrost temperature, even a seaplane that
can be used to collect weather data.

    The field work is grueling. Because of the harsh conditions, Zimov has to
station one of his five workers near the data-collection towers virtually
round-the-clock to maintain them and cull information from them weekly.
For Marat Ilyasov, 28, that means living day and night inside a tiny, one-
room cabin amid a wasteland of snow, alone and a two-hour walk from
town.

    He gets food delivered by snowmobile, has a walkie-talkie for
emergencies and relies on a stack of books to keep him occupied.

    "I don't need communication with other people so often," Ilyasov said
with a sigh, "so this is a good job for me."

    In Siberia, the permafrost entombs billions of tons of organic matter from
the Ice Age, when northern Russia's steppe teemed with mammoths, woolly
rhinoceroses, musk oxen and other wildlife. Dormant for millennia, the
permafrost is being thawed by global warming, triggering the microbial
consumption that results in the release of greenhouse gases.

    The process feeds on itself. As the climate warms, permafrost on the
banks of Siberian lakes collapses into the water, supplying bacteria with
more organic material to consume and further raising the level of methane
released into the air.

    The melting of permafrost cannot be stopped, Zimov said, but it could
be slowed.

    Not far from the research station is a 40,000-acre tract of wilderness that
Zimov believes could one day turn the tide against permafrost thaw. He
calls it Pleistocene Park, after the Ice Age epoch when mammoths roamed
Siberia.

    Zimov is reintroducing the grasses and herbivores that dominated
northern Siberian steppes 10,000 years ago, and he plans to bulldoze
portions of the park's larch forest and shrubland. Foxtail and cotton grass
are taking root, providing fodder for Yakutian horses, reindeer, musk oxen
and bison Zimov envisions on the park's flatlands.

    Steppe terrain inhibits permafrost thaw because it retains less heat than
forests and lakes, and because grass-eating mammals pack down the snow
as they graze, lessening the snow's ability to insulate the soil and keep it
warmer.

    It's nothing less than the creation of a new ecosystem, a daunting task
aimed at building a bulwark against global warming. It will take years
before the park's herds are large enough to make a discernible difference.
But Zimov hopes the park serves as a template for similar efforts across
Siberia's warming permafrost.

    "The key is to show progress here, and show it quickly," Zimov said. "It's
a very good idea and a very serious idea. It's not about how many fingers
does a beetle have."

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