> Pleistocene Park is a truly fascinating and daring experiment in the far Arctic, in Siberia, run by the Zimovs, Sergey and Nikita Zimov, a father and son scientific team, and their families. And they have this theory that large megafauna in the Pleistocene, things like mammoths and mastodons and bison, these large grazing animals, co-evolved with the grasslands that existed at the time. And so the grazers and the grasses maintained and sustained each other.
> These large animals would trample the trees and shrubs that would otherwise compete with grass, and the grass would provide these grazers with this rapidly regenerating vegetation that they could continually graze on. But it went further than that in their estimation, because, together, the grasses and the grazers, according to their theory, were helping to keep the permafrost frozen.
> So, for example, the grazers, just by being so large and by walking through these grasslands, were stripping away these insulating layers of snow, which allowed these frigid temperatures to penetrate deeper and keep that permafrost frozen. And grasses, just by virtue of being lighter, paler in color than trees, reflect more light and heat back to space. So they’re also keeping the land cooler. And so their idea is to bring back large grazing animals to Siberia, to recreate some version of these ancient Pleistocene grasslands, and thereby counteract the thawing of permafrost to some extent.
Which, of course, doesn’t really provide good justification for de-extinctifying the mammoth (although as I say this, I wonder if they might acually play a role in preserving the permafrost, as per this recent Science Friday story: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/becoming-earth-how-li... )