The Climate Crisis Has Created a Woolly Mammoth Gold Rush in Siberia

YAKUTIA, RUSSIA – Climate change is causing Siberia’s permafrost to thaw. It’s a growing environmental problem, emitting greenhouse gases, damaging buildings and creating vast craters in the landscape. But the thawing of this once-frozen ground is also revealing an ancient treasure – the tusks of woolly mammoths.

Tusks have been collected here for centuries, but the thawing permafrost combined with the global efforts to stop the killing of elephants for their ivory has led to a mammoth tusk gold rush.

The last mammoths, about the size of African elephants, died out just 4,000 years ago. Their remains are found across Europe, Asia and North America, but Siberia’s frozen ground is uniquely suited to preserving them. 

The sale of so-called “ice-ivory'' from long dead mammoths is not restricted by the many laws governing elephant ivory, and the trade has flourished over the past two decades. Up to $50 million (about £37 million) worth of mammoth tusks are unearthed in the Russian region of Yakutia every year.

Each summer, hunters journey by boat for hours or even days into the Arctic wilderness. Stepan Kornilov, who works ferrying supplies, people and mammoth ivory to and from the hunting grounds, took VICE News to meet a team of tusk hunters. 

Inside a man-made tunnel, ankle deep in cold water and swarmed by mosquitos, Kornilov uses a torch to point out the various bones jutting half frozen out of the walls. They are the remains of animals that died thousands of years ago and give the cave a pungent smell of rotting meat. Kornilov says that the bones are often found “covered with flesh.”

Water pumps and high pressure hoses are used to blast the tunnels that run hundreds of feet into the hillside. This method is destructive, illegal and dangerous. Viktor, who heads a team of hunters, agreed to speak to us, but due to the illicit nature of his work he didn’t want us to use his full name. He says another hunter recently broke his leg when the tunnel he was working in collapsed

“He's wearing a cast now, it's nothing serious, a fracture,” Viktor said. “He turned away and wasn’t looking.“

Not only is tusk-hunting dangerous, but it takes the people who do it away from their families for months on end. They work up to 12 hours a day, sleep in tents and are constantly picked at by mosquitos. 

Viktor tells us it’s all worth it because of “the money, of course.” In Yakutia’s villages wages are 30-40,000 rubles a month (about $400-$550 or about £300-400), and he says “there either isn’t work, or very little.” Working for two months as part of a hunting crew can earn you up to 400,000 rubles, the equivalent of $5,500 (about £4,000).

“It’s not bad. You can buy a car,” Viktor says. But if hunters don't find tusks, they don’t get paid, and the cost of months of fuel and supplies can leave them in debt.

At another nearby tunnel, Sergei, a crew leader, who also didn’t want us using his full name, shows us a tusk he had found a few days earlier. Unwrapping its plastic cover, he tells us it weighs about 130 pounds and is “top notch.” A tusk that size is typically sold to middlemen in Russia for around $20,000 (about £14,800), before being taken to China, where it could go for as much as $160,000 (about £118,000).

China is the main market for Yakutia’s ancient tusks. Ivory carvings are still popular there, and since the country outlawed the sale of elephant ivory in 2018, mammoth tusk is one of the only alternatives.

The value of mammoth tusks means that hunters have little interest in the countless other bones they find. When the hunters are finished digging they leave behind the skeletons of multiple ancient animals, including prehistoric bears, horses, sabre-toothed tigers and cave lions.

These abandoned finds are a palaeontologist's dream. That’s why, in 2019, a group of researchers called for tusk hunting to be banned at this site. But some scientists argue that the hunters are their only source of prehistoric remains, as they lack the funding and manpower to arrange their own digs.  

“Since about 2003, the tusk hunters became science’s main source of mammoth remains,” Dr Albert Protopopov, a palaeontologist at the Yakutia Academy of Sciences, told VICE News. Tusk hunters have gifted Protopopov some of the Academy’s most unique specimens, including Yuka, one of the best preserved mammoths ever found. Its tissue was even used by Japanese scientists in ongoing attempts to bring woolly mammoths back from extinction through cloning.

The trade in mammoth tusks hasn’t gone unnoticed by the government in Moscow, which has attempted to control it. Under regulations issued last year, tusks that are large or of scientific value can’t be exported without special permission. Critics say these stricter rules drive the market further underground, benefitting international smugglers at locals’ expense.

Tusk trader Vadim Struchkov told us that customs officials previously confiscated 50 pounds of tusks from him as he tried to cross the Russian border into China even though he says he had the right paperwork. He believes the new rules allow corruption to flourish.

“I want to legally take [ivory] out of the country, but I can't, and our Chinese friends take it through the customs checkpoint and move it with no problems. Is it fair?” he said.

But with millions of mammoths still estimated to be locked in Siberia’s frozen ground, Kornilov, whose livelihood relies on the tusk hunters, is still optimistic  about the ability of the trade to endure. “If there's profit in it, it'll keep going. What can you do? You’ve got to make a living.”