The spring 2014 annual reindeer festival in Yar-Sale, a rural town on the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, was a grim affair. A rainstorm followed by a deep freeze the previous November had turned the normally snow-covered tundra into an ice shield. Reindeer could not paw through the thick ice to access lichen, their primary food source. In a region where winter temperatures can plunge below –50° Celsius, that ground remained frozen months later. Tens of thousands of reindeer had already died of starvation. Thousands more were on the brink of death.
To the scientists in attendance, the request felt like a call to action. Serotetto was basically saying: “You scientists, what’s causing this?” says Bruce Forbes, a biogeographer at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland.
The scientists possessed a trove of satellite images of the Russian Arctic to start tackling that question, Forbes knew. But without more detailed, on-the-ground information from local inhabitants, such as the timing of the event and where it occurred, they did not know where to begin looking in that massive amount of data.
Now the two groups have joined forces to try to understand a phenomenon that has crucial implications for a people’s way of life, as well as a world at large grappling with climate change. Besides preventing herbivores from accessing foliage underneath the ice, rain on snow has been shown to trigger slush avalanches, create surface conditions that warm permafrost, change soil and vegetation conditions and disrupt transportation and communications.
2023-11-27 08:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org
