Russia’s remote permafrost thaws, threatening homes and infrastructure

A boy walks out of a cracked panel apartment building in the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk on November 26, 2018. AFP FILE PHOTO

CHURAPCHA, Russia — The old airport in the
Siberian settlement of Churapcha has been unusable for years,
its runway transformed into a swampy field of puffed-up mounds
and reliefs.

Like cities and towns across northern and northeastern
Russia, Churapcha is suffering the consequence of climate change
thawing the permafrost on which everything is built.

“There isn’t a single settlement in Russia’s Arctic where
you wouldn’t find a destroyed or deformed building,” said Alexey
Maslakov, a scientist at Moscow State University.

Homes are becoming separated from sinking earth. Pipelines
and storage facilities are under threat. Roads are increasingly
in need of repair.

As Russia warms 2.8 times faster than the global average,
the melting of Siberia’s long-frozen tundra is releasing
greenhouse gases that scientists fear could frustrate global
efforts to curb climate-warming emissions.

With permafrost covering 65% of Russia’s landmass, the costs
are already mounting.

Russia could face 7 trillion roubles ($97 billion) in
infrastructure damage by 2050 if the rate of warming continues,
said Mikhail Zheleznyak, director of Yakutsk’s Melnikov
Permafrost Institute.

The bumpy landscape around Churapcha, located some 5,000 km
(3,100 miles) east of Moscow, resembles giant sheets of bubble
wrap in places where ice wedges inside the ground have melted,
causing the ground to crumble, sag or cave in altogether.

“Roads, electric power supply lines, gas pipelines, oil
pipelines – all linear structures respond primarily to the
warming climate and its impact on the permafrost,” said
Alexander Fyodorov, deputy director of the Permafrost Institute.

‘We have to adapt’

Built in the 1960s and 1970s as Soviet Russia expanded into
the Arctic, many buildings in the far north and far east were
constructed with the assumption that the permafrost – frozen for
millennia – was sturdy and would never thaw.

Apartment blocks sit atop stilts driven meters into the
ground.

Churapcha, with a population of 10,000, saw its airport
closed in the 1990s because of the melt, scientists say.

Over the years, the once-smooth runway has become a mottled
field that looks more like a dragon’s back, as the ground sinks
and the ice melts. Eventually, the area could become a lake,
according to scientists.

Fyodorov at the Permafrost Institute has been studying the
site for years, and found that some areas were subsiding at an
average rate of 2-4 centimeters a year, while others were
sinking by up to 12 cms annually.

In eight settlements in central Yakutia, a region in
northeast Russia, 72% of people surveyed by the North-Eastern
State University said they have had problems with the subsidence
of their homes’ foundations, said Fyodorov.

Across Russia, there are more than 15 million people living
on permafrost foundations. Russia is investing to better monitor
the subterranean thaw.

“We don’t know what’s actually happening to it,” Ecology
Minister Alexander Kozlov said in August. “We need the
monitoring not only to follow what is melting and how.
Scientists will use it to predict its consequences and learn how
to prevent accidents.”

The ministry plans to deploy 140 monitoring stations, each
with up to 30-meter wells to measure the situation underground.
While that may help determine how quickly the region is thawing,
it won’t help villagers like Yegor Dyachkovsky whose home is
already buckling at Churapcha’s former airport.

In the five years since his family built their home, the
ground has sunk below it. At first the home was raised 30
centimeters off the ground on its stilt foundations. The gap is
now a full meter.

Dyachkovsky has brought five truckloads of soil to fill the
gap between the ground and his home, and says he still needs
more.

Some of his neighbors are trying to sell their homes.
“Everyone is trying to figure out the situation on their own,”
said Sergei Atlasov, another Churapcha resident.

But Dyachkovsky’s family is actually building a garage and
seems ready to take his chances.

“How can we go against nature? We have to adapt,”
Dyachkovsky said. “It’s like this everywhere. There’s no one to
complain to. To the spirit up high, perhaps.”