Thursday, December 10, 2015

Cli-Fi News: A Russian Father and His Son Seek to Transform the Arctic

Several years ago, Sergei and I had a brief email exchange -- about my concept and design of ''polar cities'' for future climate refugess -- from his home in Russia to my cave in Taiwan. He still at work there and doing important things as this news item explains:

On 10/13/07, Zimov S.A. wrote to this blogger from my files:On 10/13/07, Zimov S.A. <sazimov@cher.sakha.ru> wrote:Dear Mr. Bloom,

Thank you for your interest to the topic.

I would say YES, the world might need Polar Cities some time. I think
it can happen earlier than 2500.

Best regards,

Sergey Zimov

RUSSIA, NORTHEASTERN STATION

8:23 PM 


  • Russian ecologist Sergey Zimov has studied the decaying Arctic permafrost for decades, and has a plan to preserve it with millions of herbivores. [Photo by Eli Kintisch. Russia, 2015.]

    In April 2011, Nikita Zimov climbed into a heavy duty truck with six elk in the back and set out from Novosibirsk, a major city in southern Siberia, on a 4000-kilometer trek to the edge of the world. Time was not on his side. He had to reach the Arctic town of Chersky, where he and his father, Sergey, run a hardscrabble research outpost called the Northeast Science Station (NESS), before the spring thaw melted the frozen rivers that serve as winter roads in northern Siberia. White wooden crosses marked spots along the winding road where unlucky drivers had perished. Two weeks into his journey, just 40 kilometers from home, Zimov hit a snowbank—his brakes were shot—and the truck tipped over. Unscathed, he phoned his father and spent the next 4 hours, cold and exhausted, leaning against a flimsy tarp that covered the truck's roof to keep the elk, also uninjured, from bolting. “I was miserable,” he says. “Almost literally insane.” MORE at google.com


    NESS is more rollercoaster ride than party. One day in early July, Nikita took a dozen visiting graduate students waterskiing on the Kolyma River in a dilapidated motorboat, with techno music blasting from a portable stereo. The next day came a cluster bomb of lows. The person who maintains an atmospheric sensing tower told Nikita he intended to quit; plant samples that visiting German botanists wanted to bring home were 160 kg too heavy, and sure to create a hassle at the airport; and a moose calf for which Nikita had paid $500 escaped after jumping a makeshift pen that Sergey had built. “I told him that he should hire a carpenter, but no, he insisted he would do it himself,” Nikita says. He watches his father, wearing a mosquito head net with a hole at mouth level for an ever-present cigarette, head off on an all-terrain vehicle in search of the stray calf.

    “He is stubborn,” Nikita says with a shrug. “And I am stubborn.”

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