Out of the Ice: the History of Frozen Mammoths and the Future of Climate Change

Monday 29th April, 6pm BST

Speaker: Rebecca J H Woods (University of Toronto)

This talk explores the history of frozen mammoths, once counted among the most extreme scientific rarities. Beginning with the Adams Mammoth, collected in 1806, the talk traces how permafrost-preserved remains of woolly mammoths (and other Pleistocene megafauna) figured prominently in nineteenth-century debates about extinction, geology, evolution, and the nature of planetary cold. Over the course of the twentieth century, the frozen remains of woolly mammoths slowly became a more frequent occurrence, beginning with the Beresovka Mammoth (collected in 1901-2), and gathering pace after WWII when expanded mining operations in the Arctic revealed more permafrost-preserved Pleistocene megafaunal remains, and provided the infrastructure to successfully collect them. By the end of the 20th century, roughly thirty specimens had been collected, almost all from Siberia. But with accelerated global warming due to human activity, and expanded mining in the circumpolar arctic, these creatures now emerge from Siberia and the North American Arctic on a seasonal basis, with at least twenty discovered since 2000 alone. Their scientific uses have similarly evolved—from once-in-a-century finds, they have become bellwethers for a warming planet and an emblem of climate futures, while deextinction scientists work to resurrect woolly mammoths.

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