In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are working to turn back time by resurrecting an Ice Age environment complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths. Pleistocene Park is a radical geoengineering scheme whose goal is to combat climate change. It’s named for the geological epoch often known as the Ice Age, which ended 12,000 years ago. At that time, huge sections of the earth were covered in grasslands. When the Ice Age ended, many of the grasslands disappeared, along with most of the giant species who called them home.
The purpose of Pleistocene Park is to slow the thawing of the permafrost. Research suggests that grasslands reflect more sunlight than forests, which causes the Arctic to absorb less heat. In winter, the short grass enables the season’s freeze to extend deeper into the Earth’s crust, cooling the frozen soil.
Large herbivores are needed to test these landscape-cooling effects. While Pleistocene Park is currently home to bison, musk oxen and wild horses, hundreds of thousands of woolly mammoths are necessary to keep the trees back.
Mammoths are cold-adapted members of the elephant family. Geneticist George Church is working on editing the genomes of Asian elephants and switching in mammoth traits. In 2016, he had succeeded in editing 45 of the Asian elephant’s genes, and he hopes to deliver the first woolly mammoth to Pleistocene Park within a decade.
While it might seem like the stuff of mythology, Pleistocene Park provides us with the chance to bring another era back to the Arctic and may even have a shot at saving the planet.
