Sergey Zimov shows how methane can be stored under frozen lakes
the spots where drivers had died After two weeks and only 25 miles 40 km from his destination the truck's brakes gave out and Zimov hit a snowbank The truck tipped over Luckily neither Zimov nor the six elk were injured He called his father on his cell phone and after a cold and exhausting four hour wait help arrived This the Arctic tundra is the most dangerous territory in the world in terms of climate change Sergey Zimov ecologist at the Northeast Science Station in northern Siberia 2015 REWILDING THE TUNDRA Why did Zimov risk such a perilous journey to deliver six elk The animals were key to a tundra experiment He his father and other scientists from across the world have been conducting this study The Zimovs and their associates had found that Earth's northern permafrost the permanently frozen ground of the tundra contained more than 1 1 trillion short tons 1 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide and methane Those gases are two of the carbon based ingredients that keep Earth warm enough for humanity to survive However current climate change results in warmer temperatures that thaw tundra permafrost As the permafrost thaws large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane may be released into the atmosphere speeding up climate change For more than 20 years Sergey Zimov has worked on an experiment that would return the currently frozen moss and lichen covered ground to the grasslands that existed when mammoths and saber toothed cats roamed more than Permafrost extends downward nearly 13 000 years ago Zimov believes that restoring the 1 476 feet 450 m
tundra to grasslands would insulate the permafrost and keep it from thawing The frozen ground would keep the carbon from escaping into the atmosphere Zimov and other scientists are testing whether grazing animals such as elk reindeer horses bison and musk ox could bring back REWILDING the grasslands The original idea of rewilding came in 1998 with This is called the article Rewilding and Biodiversity by Michael E Soulé and Reed Noss They referred to it as rewilding The restoring big wilderness areas by reintroducing experiment is especially large predators Russian rewilding expert Sergey Zimov refers to it as restoring large conducted at plant eaters to the tundra to reduce permafrost the Northeast thawing These plant and meat eaters require very large land areas to be effective In the long Science Station term both types of animals would be needed to provide the balance of nature necessary to ensure NESS a the survival of the tundra grasslands 34 600 acre 14 000 ha reserve in northern Siberia The Yakutian horse is a large grazing animal that lives at the NESS
