Word: arctic
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...region has been grievously wounded, and continues to be wounded today. "Let's say you decide to get away from it all in Siberia," says Alexei Yablokov, Russia's leading environmentalist and once President Boris Yeltsin's top adviser on ecology. "You travel up the Yenisey River toward the Arctic. You look across the empty tundra and think you are alone in nature, miles upon miles from the nearest person, and you decide to stretch out on the riverbank. Unfortunately, you are lying in sands contaminated by plutonium from three upstream nuclear reactors whose radioactive wastes have been carelessly dumped...
...visited on the land. Possibly the largest single source of air pollution in the world is a complex of smelters in Norilsk in central Siberia; it pumps 2 million tons of sulfur, along with heavy metals and other poisons, into the air each year, contributing heavily to a noxious arctic haze that plagues residents of the northern latitudes as far away as Canada. Siberian industrial emissions contribute heavily to the threat of global warming, which in turn may come back to burn the region. Nearly two-thirds of the region lies atop permafrost. Climate models estimate that even a small...
...waters accumulate summer heat and melt the edges of their permafrost boundaries. Summer melting of the upper layers of the permafrost also allows leaves frozen since the Pleistocene era to return to their slow-motion decay. For years scientists were puzzled by the age of methane gases released from arctic lakes, which radiocarbon dating revealed to be more than 10,000 years old. Mammoths that strode the earth in millenniums past are still discovered almost perfectly preserved in the permafrost meat locker. Many believe the present-day Yakutian horse is itself a throwback to the era of the ice ages...
...world looks upon all these resources and salivates. Texaco, Exxon, Amoco, Norsk Hydro and other transnational oil companies are setting up joint ventures to tap into the enormous oil and gas reserves scattered through Siberia, including the Timan Pechora basin above the Arctic Circle (where the recoverable reserves are estimated at nearly 4 billion bbl.). Canadian, American and other Western mining companies are prospecting for gold and other minerals. Norwegian and Japanese interests are negotiating to increase shipping between Europe and Asia by way of arctic waters north of Siberia...
...have reason to be wary. In recent years, the decline in law and order in the former U.S.S.R. has led to a tremendous increase in poaching, particularly of the Amur tiger. Tigers once roamed Russia from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific and from the Chinese border to the Arctic. Now only the Amur subspecies remains, hemmed in to the forests of Primorski province by the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese border...