Permafrost diaries: Heading deeper into Siberia

Olga Dobrovidova investigates the social and economic impacts of thawing permafrost in Russia’s remote Arctic towns

By Olga Dobrovidova in Igarka
A week ago, I did not know what permafrost looked like or whether one can get lost in the tundra.
As of today, I have fallen into a tundra river (twice) and looked inside the permafrost–ready basement of a house through a giant crack stretching across the house. I don’t know about you, but I call that progress.
The lab has two sites some six or seven kilometres from the town, in the forest-tundra and tundra (it’s okay if you don’t really know the difference — forest-tundra is basically tundra peppered with some very sad patches of trees. It’s a border zone between the two more obvious ecosystems.)
They have boreholes about five meters deep and are monitoring temperatures down there as well as something called active layer thickness — how much permafrost thaws for the summer.
I am now doing fine with just a little cold, but it was still my personal open water swimming record of sorts. I am pretty sure I caught it on video before the first fall, so it should show up later in my final story.
The next day was First Snow Day. September 12th is probably the earliest I’ve ever seen snow in my life, so I was understandably excited, and even more so about the fact that it hadn’t snowed the day before when I enjoyed meeting Gravel River.

And then it was boat time. My next destination: Dudinka, a major river and sea port some 270 km downstream from Igarka.
It takes a large passenger ship 11 hours to get there, and while it must be absolutely marvellous in the summer, by September it’s cold enough to spend all your time inside drinking tea and only occasionally dare to go to the upper deck to try and not get blown off the ship while taking photos.
It’s a busy port and the main transport hub for Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of nickel and palladium.
Dudinka was also in that fateful paragraph that sent me on my journey of tundra river swimming and cracked houses. According to the same Roshydromet report, 55% of buildings and structures are damaged due to permafrost degradation.
By the looks of it, that figure might be accurate. A lot of buildings in Dudinka have really scary cracks like this one:
Some of them are clearly treated as a cosmetic problem but others can be very serious. I’ll delve deeper into the issue of permafrost damage triage later on.
In Norilsk, and let’s just say that’s not a sunset haze in the photo. #thefrostroads #airpollution #coughcough pic.twitter.com/b1x8xjNz64
— Olga Dobrovidova (@thegreendrafts) September 15, 2015
In the next couple of days I’m going to check out Norilsk’s infrastructure and in particular some of the sites that have reported major incidents just this year. An entrance to a blood transfusion centre suddenly collapsed this June, injuring a donor.
I’ll also look into the dark history of building Norilsk and some environmental issues that are directly connected to the state of permafrost and the changing climate.
Olga Dobrovidova’s trip is being funded by a grant from the Earth Journalism Network.
All photos by Olga Dobrovidova