Juan Villoro
The Earth is burning. After the coronavirus pandemic, global warming is advancing as an irreversible threat. The dramatic thing is not that the summer of 2023 will be particularly torrid but that it will be the coolest of the years to come.
For a few days, the skyscrapers of New York disappeared under a cloud of orange smoke from forest fires in Canada, and Africa, whose carbon emissions do not reach three percent of the world’s share, is suffering from a drought that threatens the lives of 250 million people.
Rising temperatures force us to think about one of the great cold reservoirs, Siberia, which contains the world’s most extensive layer of permafrost, i.e., permanently frozen ground. This ice valve is beginning to melt.
Siberian vegetation alternates between the boreal forests of the taiga in its southern part and the arctic mosses and shrubs of the tundra. The region’s reindeer spend the winter in the forest and the summer in the northern steppes. On their long journeys, they used to walk on frozen rivers and lakes; for some years now, they have had to swim across the water at the risk of being swept away by the current.
The Siberian changes will define not only the future of the animals in the area but also of the human species. The melting ice causes the release of carbon stored in this vast territory, which increases the greenhouse effect.
Siberia is the great zoo of the ice age. Its subsoil harbors species that have disappeared like insects trapped in a drop of amber. In 2021, two cave lion cubs were found, one 28,000 years old and the other 43,000 years old.
In Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn narrates the moment when a gang of prisoners found an antediluvian newt. Putting aside all scientific curiosity, the hungry prisoners proceeded to devour the millenary creature.
Today, Siberia is roamed by “bone hunters” who search for mammoth tusks in the softening ground. These organic remains have invisible and very long-lived tenants. Jean-Michel Claverie, emeritus professor of genomics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Aix-Marseille, calls them “zombie viruses”. The oldest of them, 48,500 years old, was named Pandoravirus yedoma in allusion to the evil box opened by the first woman in Greek mythology and the Pleistocene permafrost. Much more recent is a 27,000-year-old virus found in the wool of a mammoth.
In 2014, Claverie managed to revive a 30-thousand-year-old virus that became infectious, although it could only affect single-cell amoebas. Different was the case of the anthrax bacterium that came back from the cold in 2016 and came from a body that died in the 1848 epidemic. Over two thousand reindeer died from the infection, and about twenty herders were infected.
What will happen to other microorganisms from the distant past for which we have no antibodies? The same greed that prevents global warming from being curbed stimulates a bone safari that could unleash lethal contagions.
Solzhenitsyn spent eight years of forced labor in Siberia, and Dostoyevsky spent four. In the double imprisonment of exile and cold, both writers understood that the steppe held only one fundamental activity: waiting. In Memoirs from The House of the Dead, Dostoyevsky warns that even those condemned to life imprisonment await something, perhaps a pardon: “Calculating when my years of imprisonment would end, in a thousand different ways and aspects, was my favorite preoccupation. No matter what I did, I could not think of anything else… whatever the prisoner may be and whatever the term of his sentence… he cannot agree to consider his fate as definitive”. In Siberia, hope was long patience.
Today, the region where time has passed differently brings news too distant to be fully understood. Something profound is brewing there.
Dostoyevsky referred to the obsessive escape attempts that occurred in Siberia. In this case, there is no escape. The historical plain of the damned gradually condemns a planet where the powerful assume tragedy as a market opportunity.
While the species becomes extinct, vineyards in Patagonia, spas in Sakhalin, and golf courses in Alaska are promoted.
This was published in Spanish by Reforma on June 23, 2023
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