A Walk in the Park

There can’t be many people in the United States today who have not heard of Jurassic Park…as in, probably nobody.

You know the theme well; scientists find a way to recreate a landscape that has been lost to the sands of time.  They convert a remote plot of land into something from a bygone era, then populate it with monstrous animals from the pages of history.

There’s a good chance you have not heard of Pleistocene Park.  Well, there’s not a lot of difference between Jurassic Park and Pleistocene Park…except for one big thing. 

Pleistocene Park is real.

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I fell in love with Jurassic Park from the time I first discovered the book, which was written by Michael Crichton and published in 1990.  Steven Spielberg adapted the story for movie screens and it premiered on June 9, 1993, 29 years ago.  The movie just added to my enthusiasm.

In the movie, wealthy businessman John Hammond brings back extinct plants and animals in a wildlife park on an island off the coast of Central America. 

Chaos ensues.

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Well, Michael Crichton passed away in 2008 and I don’t know if he ever said where he got the idea for his page-turner, but it could well have been inspired by reports of Pleistocene Park.

Let me explain.

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Russian scientist Sergey Zimov embraced the theory that global warming didn’t begin with the industrial revolution, which started in about 1740.  Nope, Zimov says it actually started about 10,000 years ago. 

It’s still our fault though.

Yup, Zimov says the spread of prehistoric humans across Europe 10,000 years ago brought mass extinction of such megafauna as the wooly mammoth and the wooly rhino, as well as drastic reductions in the numbers of other species.  These animals lived on what scientists call the mammoth steppe biome.  That biome was typified by grasslands which were widespread in the area we now call Siberia.

According to Zimov, with the loss of the herds of megafauna, snow began to build up in winter and trees grew in summer.  Both replaced all the grassland, and increased the insulation of the earth.  This insulation kept the underlying layer of permafrost from getting as cold in the winter, and allowed it to thaw more in the summer.

The key here is that the permafrost over the millennia has encapsulated a lot of the grass that the megafauna had trampled down, thus preventing it from decaying and releasing the carbon that it contained.  Thus, with the change in the biome, the permafrost thawed, the grass that was frozen in it broke down, and carbon and methane (a potent greenhouse gas) were released into the atmosphere.

Ta-da-a-a-a, global warming.

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Tests and scientific study have supported much of what Zimov theorized, so he came up with a plan.

Beginning in 1988, Zimov, with the backing of the Russian government, began acquiring land and buying representatives of the species of megafauna that had not yet gone extinct and releasing them on the preserve.

The land had once been covered by huge herds of the aforementioned woolly mammoth and woolly rhino, as well as steppe wisent, moose, wapiti (in America we call them elk), Yukon wild ass, Camels, saiga antelope, Lena Horse, snow sheep, muskox, and reindeer.  Such predators as the grey wolf, cave bear, and Beringian cave lion, and several others kept numbers in check and healthy.

Zimov started with Yukatian horses, which is a cold-resistant species.  He has since encreased the numbers of the already present moose and imported wisents (European relatives of the American bison) and brought in Bactrian camels to replace their extinct relative.

You may have noted that mammoths and rhinos are absent from Zimov’s equation.  Without those big critters to knock down trees and shrubs, and to compact moss, the whole process won’t work.  Since those animals are extinct, Zimov has acquired decommissioned tanks and similar vehicles to crush pathways and allow the other animals to do what they do.

He called his creation Pleistocene Park.

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Once Zimov’s ideas were working, test showed that the vegetation in the park were starting to change.  In the areas where the horses grazed, the soil has been compacted and mosses, weeds, and willow shrub were replaced by grasses.  Grassland became the dominant landscape inside the park.  

A 2020 study by the University of Oxford assessed the viability of the park’s goals when implemented on a larger scale.  It was estimated that if three large-scale experimental areas were set up, each containing 1000 animals and costing $114 million (US) over ten years, it would encapsulate 72,000 metric tons of carbon and generate $360,000 in carbon revenues.

What about the permafrost?  When air temperature dropped to −40 °F in winter, the temperature of the ground was found to be only +23 °F under an intact cover of snow, but −22 °F where the animals had trampled down the snow.  This indicates that the grazers really do help keep permafrost intact, thereby lessening the amount of carbon and methane released by the tundra.

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While currently this is all taking place in a relatively small area, Zimov hopes to prove his theory and attain financing and backing to significantly increase the amount of land involved.  Also, advances in the science of cloning show promise in the possibility of bringing back the wooly mammoth and other species.  Besides being really neat, at least to me, these species could hopefully take back their historic jobs from the decommissioned tanks.

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What about the whole Jurassic Park, people running, screaming, and dying, thing?  OK, there’s that.  In fairness I must point out that scientists have made some serious mistakes when trying to make changes to the natural world, like the introduction of Kudzu and multiflora rose to the United States, and rabbits to Australia.  However, with plenty of study and experimentation, chances of tragic results can be reduced.  If believers in global warming are right, this is an important chance to slow or stop the problem.

If Zimov’s experiments and tests can be verified, and he can grow his operation to cover huge areas of Siberia, Pleistocene Park shows promise in controlling, or even reversing global warming.

That would be cool.

Yeah, you knew I had to say that.

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