Yakutia watches Siberian soil melt under its feet due to global warming

For more than thirty years, Isabella Stepanova has carefully recorded in notebooks the temperature readings of the village of Berdigestiakh, 160 km west of Yakoustk, in Central Siberia (Russia). From her small weather station, located right next to the racecourse, which also serves as an airport, she witnesses the rise in temperatures that is hitting her country, which is considered to be among the coldest in the world. A global warming which is discussed on the other side of the planet at the COP26 which takes place in Glasgow in Scotland. “Look, last December it was −11 °VS, says Isabella Stepanova as she flips through her statements. With us it is an abnormal temperature. In December it should be below −40 °VS ! “

Almost a year later, at the end of October, it was barely 0 ° C. Valery Dichovsky, 66, another inhabitant of the village, is sorry: “Normally we should all be on the lake fishing. But you can’t get on the ice, it’s too thin.”

Year after year, the life of the Yacoutes changes as temperatures rise. Main consequence: the thawing of permafrost (“permafrost” in English). This layer of earth, theoretically always frozen, covers 65% of the surface of Russia, and almost all of Yacoutia. This autonomous republic in eastern Siberia, almost six times the size of France, is populated by a million people who live on frozen ground that can reach 1,000 m in depth in places.

But its summit is threatened. Here, global warming is two to three times faster than elsewhere on the globe. “We are losing the layer of permafrost with which we are in direct contact, explains Nikita Tananaev, researcher at the Yakutsk Permafrost Institute. It is on it that our buildings, our roads, our rivers are based… We are changing our landscapes and our ecosystems. And we are losing them almost permanently. “

In Berdigestiakh, the headmistress of the school, Angelica Gabrilieva worries as she watches the tiled slabs on the ground floor of her establishment rise. Like most Yacoutes, she knows that the phenomenon may be due to the thawing of the ground in which the building’s foundations have been buried. In Yakutsk, the capital, several houses, often old, had to be evacuated and destroyed because they threatened to collapse. depth. For now, that’s enough, but later? “The most pessimistic models predict the loss of 30 m of permafrost by 2100”, explains Nikita Tananaev.

In some villages, such as Berdygestiakh, the consequences of the thaw are already visible. Vladimir Tarassov, Angelica Gabrilieva’s assistant takes us to a field on the edge of the taiga where he used to come to hunt. “You see, explains this forty-something by designating a vast expanse of water. Before, there was only a little lake there. And now there is water everywhere! Here, several families came to mow the hay to feed the cows or horses. But now there is only water. ” Elsewhere, landslides form craters that get deeper from year to year and deliver large bands of permafrost to the attacks of the sun and bad weather, accelerating its thaw.

These lakes which form, these lands which are deformed under the effect of the warming of the ground, they are found almost everywhere in Yakutia. At the Permafrost Institute, research director Alexander Fedorov shows us a map of the area on his computer: “There, look, this is farmland, in the Republic of Sakha [le nom officiel de la Yakoutie], there were 100,000 hectares in 1990. And here it is for 2015, he continues, pointing to another card smeared with red. There are only 40,000 hectares left. More than half as much. And that means that the people who live there, who are farmers, no longer have a job … “

This apparent abundance of water should not mask real concerns about drinking water resources, which are now threatened by these thaw phenomena. “In this region, it is impossible to dig through the permafrost to collect groundwater”, explains Antoine Séjourné, lecturer at the University of Saclay. “One must draw from the great Lena river, or from lakes. The populations also use ice which they store in the winter to drink it in the summer “, says this French researcher who knows the area well, having spent many stays there.

“The melting of the permafrost releases elements which can pollute these surface waters by making them saline, in particular. The chemistry of these waters changes and potentially we can have a big problem of water resources.”

Antoine Stayed

to franceinfo

Yakutia is just emerging from a fiery summer that saw its immense forests ignite like never before. In Berdygestiakh, the school librarian, Natalia Vassilieva exhibits the photos taken by her students, some of whom saw their houses burn down in these fires. “It was really awful, remembers this woman in her fifties. The sun was gone for six weeks. It was just a little red dot in the sky, there was so much smoke. “

In his office in Yakoustk, the vice-minister in charge of Ecology of the autonomous republic, Serguey Sivtsev, is working on the inventory of burnt areas. “We still have to do satellite surveys, he explains, but at least eight million hectares have been affected by the fires. We have always had fires in the summer, but over the past five years, there have been more and more of them and above all, they are now threatening the villages. “ Faced with the scale of the phenomenon, Serguey Sivtsev must admit his relative powerlessness.

“In the days of the Soviet Union, we had 1,600 paratroopers stationed here fighting the fires and the forestry administration employed 2,600 people. Today there are 224 paratroopers and 600 officials left.”, deplores the Deputy Minister.

The federal state has just released funds to buy equipment, strengthen patrols and replant trees, but the numbers do not seem to measure up to the immense challenge. Especially since these fires accelerate the thaw over large areas. “The forest acts as a thermal umbrella for the permafrost, protecting it from the sun and bad weather, explains Antoine Séjourné. If we lose this protection, the increases in air temperatures will be directly transferred to the permafrost. This is a phenomenon that we still have to study because we have never had fires on this scale, and the impacts can be very significant. “