Eduard Romanov pointed to a spot on a block of apartments where a major supporting beam has sagged and begun to crack, destabilizing the nine stories of apartments above.
In Russia’s Siberian city of Yakutsk, one of the coldest on Earth, climate change is causing dangerous melting of the frozen ground, or permafrost, on which the buildings stand.
“Since the year before last, the building has started to list and has tilted about 40 centimeters,” said Romanov, a construction worker and environmental advocate.
Photo: AFP
“There is a danger that it will tilt even more,” he said as laborers performed emergency welding on the structure, the temperature about minus-35°C.
Average temperatures in Yakutsk have risen by 2.5°C over the past decade, said scientists at the Melnikov Permafrost Institute located there, the world’s only such research center.
Most Soviet-era apartment blocks in Yakutsk are made of concrete panels and stand on stilts to ventilate the building’s underside and prevent it heating the permafrost, a layer of soil cemented together with water that is only stable as long as it stays frozen.
Rising summer temperatures can destroy the solid permafrost. As the ice melts, the clay or sand simply sinks together with whatever is on top of it — a road, a building, a lake or a layer of fertile “black earth” for agriculture.
Permafrost covers almost the whole of Yakutia — a northeast region bordering the Arctic Ocean, an area five times the size of France.
In total, about 65 percent of Russian territory is covered by permafrost.
With a population of about 300,000, Yakutsk is the world’s largest city built on permafrost, and it could be especially in danger from the melting that Romanov and many residents fear.
Older buildings were not constructed with a warming climate in mind.
In the 1960s, the norm was to drive stilts 6m deep into the solid permafrost, which is no longer sufficient today as the surface warms, Romanov said.
Some buildings in Yakutsk have already had to be demolished, while others are full of cracks.
“All of Yakutsk is in danger. The owners face losing their property and nobody is ready for this,” Romanov said. “These problems will multiply in the future, so we need to start addressing this today.”
As an Arctic nation, Russia is warming about two-and-a-half times faster than the rest of the world.
In Yakutsk, locals have said that two decades ago schools would be closed for weeks on end when temperatures dropped to minus-55°C, but such spells of extreme cold are now rare.
The Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment said in a report this year that deterioration of permafrost poses many risks to people and nature.
It affects water, sewage and oil pipes, as well as buried chemical, biological and radioactive substances, the report said.
Melting permafrost enables any pollutants to spread faster and more widely, seeping through previously solid ground, the report said.
Institute deputy director Mikhail Grigoryev said that so far the warming is “not critical” locally, but could endanger the city if it continues over decades.
He is most concerned about permafrost’s southernmost boundary, in areas such as oil-rich western Siberia.
There, permafrost is not as cold, consistent or thick, and warming can “lead to the deformation of buildings, to disasters,” he said.
“Nothing that was built on permafrost was built with the expectation that it would melt,” Grigoryev said. “We must prepare for the worst.”
In the institute’s underground labs — a network of ice-covered tunnels and rooms dug in the permafrost — scientists and engineers develop improved construction techniques and ways to keep the ground frozen as the atmosphere warms.
One method that is already available involves burying vertical metal tubes filled with a non-freezing agent, such as freon or kerosene, in the ground with a part sticking out around or near a building. In winter the agent condenses in the cold atmosphere and drops below the ground surface to keep it cold.
However, the technology is costly and its use in construction is not required by the law, which has not adapted to the warming climate, said Vladimir Prokopyev, a lawmaker in Yakutia’s regional parliament.
Melting permafrost accelerates erosion of Russia’s Arctic coast, and Yakutia is losing about 2m of coastline every year, he said.
The region this year became the first in Russia to pass a permafrost protection law and is lobbying Moscow to take measures on a national level.
The law calls for the monitoring and prevention of irreversible loss of permafrost, but Prokopyev said that Moscow has been hesitant to treat it as a priority.
“We need a national law if we want to conserve permafrost and prevent serious harm to the environment of the Russian North and Siberia,” he said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of