Flying over Yakutia, in northeastern Russia, I watched the dark shades of the boreal forest blend with patches of soft, lightly colored grass. I was strapped to a hard metal seat inside the cabin of an Antonov-2, a single-¬engine biplane, known in the Soviet era as a kukuruznik, or corn-crop duster. The plane rumbled upward, climbing above a horizon of larch and pine, and lakes the color of mud. It was impossible to tell through the Antonov’s dusty porthole, but below me the ground was breathing, or, rather, exhaling.
A bit later, he follows that up with this beauty:
At the moment, though, I was mainly concerned with the stomach-turning lurches the plane was making as it descended in a tight spiral. We had dropped to a few hundred feet above the ground so that Maximov’s colleague, a thirty-three-year-old researcher named Roman Petrov, could take the final sample, a low-altitude carbon snapshot. The plane shook like a souped-up go-kart. Petrov held his stomach and buried his face in a plastic bag. Then I did the same. When we finally landed, on a grass-covered airstrip, I staggered out of the cabin, still queasy. Maximov poured some Cognac into a plastic cup. A long sip later, I found that the spinning in my head had slowed, and the ground under me again took on the feeling of reassuring firmness—even though, as I knew, what seemed like terra firma was closer to a big squishy piece of rotting chicken.
That detail of the plastic cupful of Cognac is excellent; it totally hooked me on the piece. I also relished its first-person perspective:
To get a sense of how permafrost thaw is changing the landscape, I took a drive out of Yakutsk with Nikolay Basharin, a thirty-two-year-old researcher at the Permafrost Institute.
Three days later, I caught a flight on a propeller plane leaving Yakutsk for Chersky, a speck of a town on the Kolyma River, near the delta where it empties into the East Siberian Sea.
One day in Chersky, I visited a site along the river managed by a German research team from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry.
Earlier in the summer, I visited Yamal, a peninsula that juts into the Kara Sea like a crooked finger.
One day in Chersky, Zimov showed me a site where he had tried to mimic the result of a fire on the permafrost.
Zimov and I were each carrying a long metal probe, the permafrost scientist’s classic field tool.
Yaffa is in Ian Frazier country. Frazier wrote one of my all-time favourite books – Travels in Siberia (2010), excerpts of which appeared in The New Yorker (August 3, 10 & 17, 2010). In that book, Frazier visits the Academy of Sciences headquarters in Yakutsk, where he views, among other things, a mammoth leg, “with its well-preserved long hair.” Yaffa, in his piece, also views (and actually handles) a mammoth leg. His mammoth leg is in Yakutsk’s Mammoth Museum, so I don’t think it’s the same leg that Frazier saw, but you never know. How many intact mammoth legs can there be? In my favourite scene in “The Great Thaw,” Yaffa writes,
Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. “Look, its footpad is very well traced,” Fedorov said. “You can see its toenails.”
That “so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.
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