Save the Permafrost

Last night I started listening to Woolly by Ben Mezrich.  Ostensibly it is about the implications of recreating the woolly mammoth using DNA, but the true message is much more important. I don't know why more people and the media aren't talking about it. In creating Pleistocene Park, a wildlife preserve in Siberia, father and son research team Sergey and Nikita Zimov discovered that the carbon stored in the permafrost would holds twice as much carbon dioxide as is currently released into the atmosphere. The destruction of the permafrost would dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere.  The Zimovs also discovered that repopulating the tundra with animals closest to the ones who used to live there to bring back the grasslands and the permafrost captured by them would help stabilize the climate. 

The woolly mammoths were part of the fauna of the Pleistocene grasslands. It turns out the most recent mammoths died only 3,000 years ago making the recreation of DNA much more possible.

By Mauricio Antón - from Caitlin Sedwick (1 April 2008). "What Killed the Woolly Mammoth?". PLoS Biology 6 (4): e99. DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060099., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11781070

To be completed.  This is too important not to be on the web.