Siberia's Pleistocene Park -A Window on the Ice Age

During the Pleistocene Epoch, much of the tundra, forest, scrublands and intricate waterways of the Siberian north was covered with a steppe grassland which was the home of millions of bison, mammoths, and other grazing animals.

Scientific research indicates that while Neanderthals became extinct during the Pleistocene, humans evolved into their present form. A major extinction event of large mammals, which included mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, glyptodons, ground sloths, and short-faced bears, began late in the Pleistocene and continued into the Holocene.

Sergei Zimov, Director of the Northeast Science Station in Sakha - also known as Yakutia - a huge Russian province in eastern Siberia, realized a long-standing dream in 1989 to create Pleistocene Park, an attempt to recreate a fully fledged Ice Age eco-system in a remote corner of Siberia, complete, if possible, with woolly mammoths.

At the end of the Pleistocene era - 10,000 years ago - woolly mammoths, rhinoceroses and tigers roamed the region among herds of horses, bison, musk-ox and Siberian antelope would have roamed the meadows and vast savannahs.

It is the hope of the supporters of Pleistocene Park that bison, a key element of the prehistoric steppe tundra ecosystem, will join the horses, moose, caribou and muskoxen. Eventually, this park may be a home for the endangered Siberian tiger, a descendant of the major predator of the prehistoric ecosystem.

Zimov's grasslands could also have a significant role in slowing global warming. One of the potential dangers of future climate change is that it could melt the Siberian permafrost, releasing huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.

Grass insulates the permafrost better than mossy wetlands and so would slow the rate of thaw during any global warming that might be coming our way.