The diesel catastrophe in Siberia is just a symptom – it gets worse
The red colored river water made it look like Siberia’s nature was bleeding: but a huge diesel leak is a symptom of a much worse condition. The thawing of the permafrost is a disaster.
At first, only one fire was reported at 12.45 p.m. local time from the city of Norilsk in Siberia. A car had run into a fuel area. Diesel was standing on the carriageway because 21,000 tons had just escaped from a tank that had become unstable, colored the surrounding rivers red and still sloshing towards the Arctic Sea.
But the fire and the worst oil spill in Russia are the result of an even more formidable problem: the permafrost is thawing and is not just causing the tank farms to slide. This will cost Russia $ 100 billion over the next few years, and the world is said to be fueled by climate change and the risk of diseases preserved in the ice.
The ground is thawing deeper and deeper
A few days before the accident, on May 23 in Norilsk it was as warm as 23 degrees in Zurich. The average temperature of the past 30 years in this part of Siberia is actually minus 4.8 degrees. This May, the thermometer only dropped below zero degrees for an hour at all.
The month was the warmest May in the world since weather records began, and in parts of Siberia the temperature was even ten degrees too high. And that after 2019, which was the warmest year in Russia. In Norilsk last year the ground was thawed to a depth of 113 centimeters at a measuring point, in 2005 only to a depth of 81 centimeters.
Climate change is twice as noticeable in the Arctic Circle as in the global average. And Russia is built on a melting surface. Permafrost is almost two thirds of the country’s surface. Only every 20th Russian lives in these parts of the country, but every sixth ruble for buildings, factories and streets is invested there. 80 percent of the gas production sites, many oil wells and other mineral resources are located in the permafrost areas. Cities have sprung up around these locations and industries.
Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted the problem in unprecedented clarity in December. Moscow was around 5 degrees warmer than it had been in December since the recording began when he raised the subject at his annual press conference in front of almost 2,000 journalists. «If the permafrost soils thaw, you can imagine the consequences. This can lead to devastation in some regions, which affects all of us, »he said.
Almost at the same time, a study came out that calculates the consequences: According to this, the damage to the infrastructure to be expected up to the 2050s is $ 106 billion (€ 94 billion) in a medium scenario. For the calculation, an American-Russian research team led by Dimitri Streletzki from George Washington University in Washington took the mean of a scenario from several climate models that predicts a temperature increase of 3.8 degrees for Siberia.
The softening floor causes damage to houses
And the foundations of all buildings in the city of Yakutsk can deform as early as 1.5 degrees, according to the scientists. 1,000 buildings have already been damaged there, said Mayor Sardana Avksentieva, who has to have roads and sidewalks repaired all the time.
Half of the Russian permafrost soil will have lost its load capacity by 2050 to 2059, the researchers said. In the scenario, 54 percent of all residential buildings in the permafrost area are affected with damage of $ 20.7 billion. A fifth of the commercial buildings will be damaged by thawing. Likewise, with a similarly high proportion of roads, lines and other infrastructure, a total of $ 84.4 billion.
The scientists say that the calculation is still incomplete: a bad case with strong warming was assumed. Increasing erosion on the coast is not included, nor are large fires, floods and drought resulting in rivers that cannot be navigated. “The combined economic costs can significantly increase the estimates presented in this study.” Cleaning costs of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars as after the Norilsk diesel accident should not be included in the bill.
Not only Russia is affected
Russia is special, but it is not alone affected. In Alaska, for example, the 380 people of the Yupik indigenous people can sing a lament. They are the inhabitants of a village founded around a new school in 1949, which will soon disappear. They are relocated because an increasingly wide river forms where their houses are.
Children of the Yupik indigenous people: their village in Alaska is threatening to sink into the rising water. Image: AP
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Her fate received worldwide attention when a series of pictures from there was honored with a third place at the World Press Photo Award 2020. The photographer Katie Orlinsky documents the consequences of climate change in the northern polar region.
In Russia she was able to take one of the most impressive pictures of the Batagaika crater. Since the 1960s, there has been an ever larger hole in the ground. Thermokarst is the phenomenon when ice melts in the subsoil, the water flows off and the earth collapses due to the loss of volume. This then sets in motion dew and decomposition processes even in deeper layers, destruction processes reinforce themselves.
At Batagaika crater, the fully preserved ice mummy of a foal of an extinct wild horse species was brought to light in 2018. Scientists at the University of Yakutsk estimated their age to be 30,000 to 40,000 years. A stroke of luck for science, and in Siberia some lucky knights now live from the illegal trade in mammoths that were traveling 10,000 years ago in temperate northern Siberia and are now appearing in many places.
“Zombie bacteria” from the eternal ice
But the huge fridge also gives far more dangerous greetings from the past. A twelve-year-old and his grandmother died of anthrax in 2016. There was talk of “zombie bacteria” because the cause is reindeer that died almost 80 years ago. At that time, 7,000 carcasses are said to have been buried in the icy ground.
Young crater: After deforestation, the Batagaika crater formed in the 1960s. Since then, it has grown to almost a kilometer in length and 86 meters in depth due to the melting of the perma forest soil, and it continues to grow rapidly. Image: AP / North-Eastern Federal University
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In Alaska’s tundra, researchers found the Spanish flu virus of 1918 in mass graves. Smallpox pathogens could not only be frozen in a few high-security laboratories. French researchers have also found a virus that was frozen 30,000 years ago and is attacking amoeba again in the laboratory. This virus is harmless to humans.
“We don’t know what’s in the ice,” Birgitta Evengard told NPR, a microbiologist at Umea University in Sweden who is leading a research project on climate change infections in the Arctic. “It’s Pandora’s Box.”
And while the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere has risen so far primarily because humans have released carbon for many thousands of years, nature is now beginning to do so. A thousand billion tons of carbon are stored in the top three meters of permafrost, because plants grew there during the short growing season, but hardly any decomposition took place.
Large amounts of methane and carbon dioxide threaten to be released
But if the permafrost disappears, the result is that microorganisms living in the soil decompose the animal and plant remains that were protected by the frost for a long time. A process with many consequences: “It is to be feared that large amounts of carbon emit from the stored substances primarily in the form of methane, but also as carbon dioxide,” wrote the Federal Environment Agency in 2006. Warming releases greenhouse gases that can lead to further warming.
Consequences of thawing in the permafrost: Thermokarst lakes in the tundra. Image: shutterstock
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The problem was well known, the exact dimensions are not yet. Methane is apparently not released to the extent that is sometimes feared that part of the CO2 emissions could absorb the increasing vegetation. But the fires in Siberia’s forests are also increasing.
In 2019, the UNEP UNEP declared the thawing of permafrost to be one of five impending and underestimated environmental hazards. The chapter on this was written by the moor scientist and paleoecologist Prof. Hans Joosten. It also warns of the additional danger of gigantic peat fires in dry moor soils: where ice in the subsoil no longer forms an insulating shield, water can seep away. Where it builds up, wetlands and lakes accelerate thawing processes beneath them and act as an insulation layer in winter. The floor below freezes more slowly. A self-reinforcing process.
Like tipping dominoes
The thawing of permafrost soils is now considered a tipping point for the climate. Developments that have other effects, such as falling dominoes. “As science advances, we also have to realize that we may have underestimated the risks of irreversible changes that can lead to self-reinforcing global warming,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK ), to a study on the tipping points. “It could be very difficult or even impossible to stop the whole line of dominoes from tipping over.”
Russian President Putin also appealed in his press conference: “We must not remain inactive, we must do everything we can to stop climate change.” He could also start in his own country: Russia is different from the US under Trump under the Paris climate agreement, but the goals are modest. In the Climate Change Performance Index of several NGOs, Russia, which is responsible for six percent of global CO2 emissions, ranks 52nd out of 61 places with “very low” efforts. Maybe the diesel accident is a new wake-up call.
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