Can rewilding rescue the permafrost?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, cloning, DNA, woolly mammoths, rewilding

All the people in Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive one of History's Most Iconic Extinct Creatures are real, as are all the events prior to the last two chapters. Author Ben Mezrich used interviews and published materials to produce a narrative that recounts events over the past half century or so—though mostly over the past twenty-odd years—leading into a concerted effort to produce the DNA needed to revive the species Mammuthus primigenius, the Woolly Mammoth.

The main protagonist is Dr. George Church, a very active and productive genetic researcher. If you've heard his name at all, it is probably in connection with the Human Genome Project. Dr. Church is somewhat self-effacing compared to others who "got famous". Famous or not, he is a prime problem-solver, and gathers problem-solvers around him. That's what you need to tackle a project like this.

I was most intrigued by a side theme of the book, the rewilding of Siberia and possibly northern Canada, with the aim of restoring the permafrost. This entails gathering not just extinct pachyderms, but a number of living cold-adapted herbivores such as Musk Oxen. As I understand it, the large mammals of the Pleistocene fauna could churn the upper surface of the ground, which tends to allow the winter chill to make new permafrost in wintertime but blocks solar heating in summertime. The idea is to keep the huge carbon stores of the permafrost from being oxidized and thus adding many-fold to the greenhouse heating being caused by extra carbon dioxide already released by our burning of fossil fuels. That idea alone was enough to push Dr. Church over the threshold from "We can revive the Mammoth, but should we?" to "We can and we should!"

The larger key idea of the book is the concept, not of simply "finding" mammoth DNA, but learning enough from the DNA sequence to determine the key differences between mammoth DNA and Asian elephant DNA, so as to rewrite critical sections of an elephant genome and thus produce a viable mammoth ovum.

The book ends with a scene of the first mammoth returned to Siberia, perhaps as early as about 2020. However, in an epilogue by Dr. Church, he considers a more realistic figure to be 15-20 years from now. Considering the number of breakthroughs already made, a living mammoth might appear sooner than that. Producing a herd of them will take longer, but a herd is needed to have a useful effect on Siberian (or Canadian) permafrost.