Siberia - Champions of Prehistory

Sergey Zimov is a Russian geophysicist. He and his son Nikita want to stop the thawing of the Siberian permafrost due to climate warming. The frozen soil in Siberia not only contains the bones of ancient mammoths, but microbes that - when aroused from tens of thousands of years of dormancy - could push the global climate to an irreversible tipping point.

Zimov is an internationally renowned scientist with links to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He and his son Nikita have long warned about the drastic consequences of thawing permafrost. It is a vicious circle: the current climate warming is causing more and more of the soil to thaw. This releases the microbial metabolic products CO2 and methane gas, which cause still more global warming. The two men are hoping to defuse this ticking Ice Age time bomb with their Pleistocene Park. The idea behind it is to recreate the conditions that existed 20,000 years ago, using reindeer, bison and muskoxen to turn the tundra into a subarctic steppe. And if the geneticists at Harvard can manage it, the nature reserve might even feature a giant herd of mammoths.