PHOTO: MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
W
ith the Arctic warming up to four
times faster than the global aver-
age, temperatures in the frozen
soil, or permafrost, under north-
ern Siberia have been rising,
turning firm ground unstable
and weakening foundations. On 29 May
2020, the thaw may have helped lead to a
disaster, when a diesel fuel depot near the
town of Norilsk collapsed and spilled more
than 21,000 tons of fuel into a small river.
The pollution turned the river rusty-red
and ultimately reached the Arctic Ocean.
The owner of the fuel depot, Norilsk
Nickel, the world’s largest miner of nickel
and palladium, was fined almost $2 billion
for the spill—the largest settlement for an
environmental disaster in Russian history.
Now, the disaster has spurred the gov-
ernment to set up the first national system
to monitor Russia’s permafrost—the world’s
largest expanse of frozen soil, covering two-
thirds of the nation. In October, President
Vladimir Putin gave the go-ahead to a new
$21 million system of 140 monitoring sta-
tions that could begin to deliver data as soon
as 2023. Sensors placed in boreholes up to
30 meters deep will measure the temperature
of permafrost at various depths, a critical pa-
rameter for tracking both the growing haz-
ard thawing ground poses to infrastructure
and the broader climate threat: that the thawcould release billions of tons of carbon into
the atmosphere.
Researchers say the new nodes will bolster
a patchy system of some 440 boreholes, run
by research organizations and private com-
panies like Norilsk Nickel, that had been in
place since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“There was no national system at all, which
was such a shame, and now we may get one,”
says Dmitry Streletskiy, a climatologist at
George Washington University who co-leads
the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring
program, which has supported more than
250 sites globally and 75 in Russia since the
1990s with funding from the U.S. National
Science Foundation. “I’ve been arguing for
years that we need one.”
The origin of the national monitoring sys-
tem can be traced to a 2020 report authored
by researchers from permafrost-focused
institutes in Russia and commissioned by
Alexander Kozlov, who was then minister
for the development of the Russian Far East
and Arctic. Kozlov later became the minister
of natural resources and the environment,
where he oversaw plans for the current sys-
tem, which will be operated by Roshydromet ,
the state weather agency that operates under
the aegis of the environment ministry.
Marat Sadurtdinov, who heads the Earth
Cryosphere Institute in Tyumen and was a
co-author of the report, is disappointed by
the current plan. In the report, the research-
ers called for a larger $160 million systemthat would have tracked other parameters
in addition to temperature, such as moisture
or ice content, and would have been oper-
ated by an independent interagency entity.
Sadurtdinov is concerned that the system
will not gather enough information to pro-
vide warnings to the owners of vulnerable
roads, pipelines, and buildings, and that
Roshydromet’s weather stations may not be
the ideal locations for permafrost measure-
ments. “We’ve talked about this everywhere,
and the ministry knows it and is listening to
us,” Sadurtdinov says.
In a statement provided to Science, the en-
vironment ministry insists there is “no con-
tradiction” between the commissioned report
and its plans. It says Roshydromet was picked
to lead the system in part because attaching
the permafrost stations to the existing net-
work of weather stations will minimize costs.
Roshydromet has assigned the design and
rollout of the system to the Arctic and Ant-
arctic Research Institute (AARI), which cur-
rently has five permafrost monitoring sites
in the Russian Arctic. Aleksandr Makarov,
AARI director, says the first nodes could be
deployed this summer.
The nodes would add to the sparse data
sets used to calibrate climate models that
predict changes in permafrost. Knowing
how fast the permafrost is warming and
thawing is critical to assessing the fate
of the trillion or more tons of carbon in
the frozen organic matter—more than the
atmosphere now holds. Once it thaws,
microbes could decompose the organic
matter and release the carbon to the air—
exacerbating global warming via the so-
called “permafrost feedback.” Researchers
rely on models, says Oleg Anisimov, who
heads climate change research at the State
Hydrological Institute, because “you can’t
stick a sensor into every swamp to see
what’s going on with carbon emissions.”
Adding sensors for carbon dioxide and
methane would make the network even
more powerful, says Guido Grosse, who
studies permafrost at the Alfred Wegener
Institute. But he agrees that even tempera-
ture data can help calibrate the modeling
estimates for permafrost carbon fluxes, and
he hopes researchers outside Russia will
have access to the readings via the Global
Terrestrial Network for Permafrost, which
gathers data from existing boreholes. “It’s
important that the data becomes available
to the scientific community at large—not
10 years from now but as soon as possible,”
he says. jOlga Dobrovidova is a science journalist in Moscow.SCIENCE science.org 7 JANUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6576 15Permafrost thaws have softened foundations and
damaged buildings in Siberian cities such as Yakutsk.By Olga DobrovidovaCLIMATE CHANGERussia begins work on national
permafrost monitoring system
Data could improve climate models and provide warnings
for infrastructure vulnerable to thawing soil