Editors' Picks
The Russian Scientists Bringing Back the Ice Age
Mar 09, 2017
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554 videos
Video by
Grant Slater
Sergey Zimov and his son, Nikita, are attempting to recreate a long-lost ecosystem in the Siberian Arctic. It will be a refuge for species that survived the last Ice Age—and a perfect ecosystem to bring others back from extinction. They call it Pleistocene Park. “It’s one of the few places in the world where no one will really object to our experiments,” Nikita says in this short documentary, Mammoth, by Grant Slater. The Zimovs plan to populate the remote park with animals like bison, musk oxen, and even lab-grown woolly mammoths. They’ve already shipped hundreds of animals to the reserve. Their goal is to slow the thawing of the permafrost, the carbon-filled frozen soil covering much of the Arctic. If it melts, an enormous amount of carbon will be released into the atmosphere. The park is intended to stave off the worst consequences from climate change. Read more about the science and vision behind the Zimovs plan in Ross Andersen’s article in The Atlantic’s April issue, “Welcome to Pleistocene Park.”
Author: The Editors
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