Can woolly mammoths save the world?: Luke Griswold-Tergis at TEDxConstitutionDrive

so my talk is called can woolly mammoth save the world and uh I considered it Colleen can woolly Russian geophysicist save the world but it was too late to change the title this is um Sergey DeMuth in a son Nikita and they have this plan to restore the mammoth steppe ecosystem which was this ecosystem that spread from Spain all the way to Canada and it was a grassland that it was full of like big hairy beasts like woolly mammoths and they think that by restoring this ecosystem they can prevent permafrost from melting which will in turn prevent this catastrophic global warming feedback loop this is what the mammoth step might have might have looked like I I think this story is to me as a filmmakers interested in it for a couple of reasons one it's um I mean it's a story about state a DIY attempt to stave off the apocalypse which everybody loves but but it's also makes it interesting thought experiment cuz um you knows what is our in this in the Anthropocene in this era when humans are having this totally unprecedented impact on the rest of life on earth what is our relationship with the rest of life and what do we want that relationship to me and I think this kind of addresses that last summer I went to Siberia to meet Sergei and start filming we take a lot for granted in America in Russia in the airplane lands everybody applauds wildly and you kind of understand why when at the end of the runway there's like all these wrecked planes bulldozed into the bushes at the end of the runway and chair ski the town they live in it's an interesting place it's kind of this like abandoned Soviet ghost town in the middle of nowhere five and a half hour flight in the nearest town it's also interesting because um is essentially sitting on top of this five hundred foot deep frozen compost pile which stretches to the horizon it stretches beyond the horizon it stretches across time zones and as Sergey says the permafrost will melt and there's only one theoretical chance to mitigate this melting and to put this in perspective there's something in the range of 750 gigatonnes of carbon in the atmosphere currently and um there's something to the range of 1600 gigatonnes of carbon locked up in permafrost and sergei was actually one of the people that first figure this out pointed out to the world people just didn't know there's all this carbon and permafrost and the implication of this is if and when it melts as Sergey says we're in deep dark wooly mammoths duty there's a lot of research going on trying to figure out exactly what's happening to permafrost this is the eddy flux covariance Tower I turned the volume down oh well and it's actually measuring co2 concentrations and methane concentrations they arm they liberated this from a nearby military base and when they lowered it down they weren't so gentle you can see it's pretty crooked it's a little bit terrifying being up there but there's like super important research going on with this tower with American researchers and European researchers NOAA's involved when Sergei back in the 80s he like have used first Epiphanes about the mammoth step and about the amount of carbon and the first thing he thought is this doesn't add up because the current ecosystem the Arctic is this incredibly low productivity ecosystem it's like mosses lichens a few berry bushes and larch trees a lot a lot of large trees you like you hardly see wildlife in Siberia largely because poaching is pretty bad and so by by productivity we mean like shear photosynthetic productivity like a plant's ability to take energy from the Sun use that to pull co2 out of the atmosphere and convert that into any of sugars and starches and like the the body of the plant and as sergei points out the reason why plants grow incredibly slow up there is because it's cold and things biodegrade really quickly so these large needles they could be like five years old and they're still look like nart larch needles so like the nitrogen the phosphorus all the nutrients these plants need to grow are bound up in these needles and they're not available to grow more plants we're in a herbivore grassland ecosystem grass grows really quick it gets eaten by an herbivore inside a herbivores belly summer winter it's like 37 degrees centigrade year-round it's full of bacteria and in that temperature stuff breaks down really quick stuff breaks down in a matter of hours in those nutrients through again available to plants to grow more and so during the mammoth stuff it was like 2 million you know the Pleistocene was like 2 million years and soil just was built layer upon layer of soil of like you know horse dung and roots growing and like Oh some dust blowing in and this is how that's 500 foot compost pile got constructed and they did some really fascinating research this is Advani yarn a Rodian riverbank on the on the Kalima river and a lot of bones washed out of this riverbank it's just like packed with animal bones and so they assembled all the bones from a given area and after a lot of math and statistics about like animal average animal life expectancy into distribution of bones and like how likely they are to survive they came up with herbivore density or so in an average square kilometer of Siberian lowland there would have been one woolly mammoth five bison eight horses however many reindeer that is and a few other species and lower numbers like musk ox and stuff Sergei is also like very convinced that humans are responsible for wiping this out the same applies for North America and this is like disputed Stasi guman the fellow in this photo is actually a very respected scientist who disagrees with Sergei about this but Sergei s theory is that the this cycle was broken it was like this you know these complex nonlinear systems and you upset and it finds a new equilibrium so without animals to cycle nutrients the graphs couldn't grow in animals couldn't recover from over hunting Sergei says that he had this epiphany about the mammoth steppe sometime back in the 80s and he um he immediately went and got a herd of horses like the next day and his son Nikita says like it probably wasn't the next day but it was pretty quick and he bought this herd of horses their local um you could teens keep them and he let him loose in a meadow near his house and he didn't build a fence or anything because why would they go anywhere and the horses weren't like privy to his logic and it promptly made this like 500 mile trek back to their home pasture in the dead of winter like walking down frozen rivers and stuff so Sergei had to start over and he got he got more horses and he built fences this time he built fences and he started getting other animals and it's kind of this like Arctic Noah's Ark Willy place the same thing he has going on so this is a European bison it's a kind of bison a baby moose the story about how to catch the moose is really funny but I can't tell it now a musk ox they nearly died him and Nikita taking this like little boat to wrangle island off the northern coast of Siberia to pick up these musk ox because they didn't have money to fly and then or anything and and there's a few other species that got to elk that elk actually like jumped over the fence and ran away there's a bunch of caribou or reindeer that you don't see very often they hide out in the bushes and so you're probably wondering how is this going to prevent permafrost from melting and as you can see it's a simple function in the winter the ground is covered by this like metre thick layer of snow in the summer the snow melts off and it's sunny like it never gets dark for like three or four months and the ground absorbs heat from sunlight and it melts the upper layer the active layer which is where all plants their roots are like in this upper meter a little less than a meter and then the wintertime it snows again covers the ground so that heat that was absorbed during the summer it can't escape imagine if you had like a down comforter this thick over you like it traps a lot of heat and so what these animals are doing is all winter long they're looking for food and you can see they're skinny because they're hungry and like any blade of grass that fits there they're going to dig through the snow and get it and they've trampled all the snow so it's rather than being a metre thick it's like yes ten centimeters thick and it has much less insulative capacity that way and so they actually put data loggers temperature sensors out in this field and in their control site in an area outside the fence the I think March temperature at a depth of like half a meter or something was negative seven centigrade and in this spot inside this sense it was negative twenty three centigrade it even key I mean is a preliminary data so it's not like they're not writing papers about this yet but even Nikita was blown away that the trampoline made such a big difference in soil temperature it's really important to point out that um this is not going to solve global warming we would have to stop burning fossil fuels to do that is what this will do is prevent this like runaway feedback loop caused by melting permafrost which could make global warming far worse than has currently been imagined everybody wants to know in the title of the talk where ee mammoths fit into this and it actually quite irritates the Z mobs as Nikita puts it to me like a woolly mammoth will be cloned see and there's people working on including like folks right nearby at UCSC it's not that far out but it's probably not going to happen in sir gays lifetime I ecological meaningful level like enough woolly mammoths to have any kind of impact so they hope their clone they'll happily take some but they're trying to do this without woolly mammoths and really they say is what Nikita said is like we're trying to clone an entire ecosystem we and we don't need one single species to do that we can do that with animals we already have it's kind of cowboy eco engineering like a lot of other cowboy engineering that's going on there yes Sergei does drive around in a tank um they um it's well for starters Sergei he's a very respected scientist and um he's he's um he's collaborated a lot with a lot of American some fellow I met at a conference recently was like like a very respected ecologist was like Sergei he may or may not be crazy but he's probably the smartest person I've ever met but at the same time a lot of the science is pretty controversial and it's like not everybody is an agreement on some of the things he's saying so in making this film I I kind of want to explore the science and explore that controversy not just like cakes or gays word is the word of God but the other interesting question is can they pull it off because it's just like this one family in this post-apocalyptic town in the middle of the Siberian wilderness the whole thing is self-funded it's just the family you know like as Nikita says like my father is the brains I am the Brawn and that's kind of how they roll in some ways chair ski is like a good place to do a project like this because no one's looking over their shoulder they can do whatever they want which is how surrogate ended up there in the first place is he wanted to get away from Soviet bureaucracy and he went to a place where no one would tell them what to do but on the other hand it's Russia so Sergei got a herd of Canadian wood bison imported they're bigger than a plains bison and they live farther north and they got shipped they got flown into yeah Koontz and the governor of Yakutia basically hijack fear gays bison and put him in his own game park and steer gay this was like six years ago and Sergei still hasn't seen his bison you know like how often you have to deal with the International bison jacking is a work hazard um and I actually when I heard this story I told Sergei that I'm planning on buying this boat this summer and and once I get it fixed up I could bring him a herd of bison it's only like eight days sailing from Homer Alaska to chair ski bypassed Yakutia and it would be like really straightforward and Sergei his response was uh I look forward to receiving these bison but my brain is very important for the future of science therefore I will not be accompanying you on this voyage Sergei sometimes just seems really really frustrated that um people seem more worried about a new iPhone than about existential existential threats to the future of life as we know it and he's made it pretty clear that he's um stockpiling food and vodka and ammunition and fish net and that no matter what happens to the rest of us he's going to make sure that his children and his grandchildren survive whatever's coming um so that's the end it's not a super positive note hey dance if you're on stage get back on stage so we're gonna do a little Q&A but it does occur to me that most geniuses were thought to be crazy in their own time so who knows whether it's genius or insanity I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure it's both everything after hanging out with him for a month I'm pretty sure it's about um questions from the audience right there Oh Pleistocene Park yeah which is what they call their Park kind of like Jurassic Park only Pleistocene I don't know if that was intentional or non-intentional questions how does he use the tank Oh yes that's an ironic point that I didn't bring up um he actually says that the tank is his synthetic woolly mammoth and he drives it around smashing bushes and stuff which is what William amis would have done like elephants in Africa our landscape act architects they open gaps in the forest so other species can grow up and you can literally see where the tank is driven the tank tracks and there's like that'll be like lurch for us and there's like grass growing up in the tank tracks like like it really has that effect and he says like only problem with the synthetic woolly mammoth is it does not poop um and when I was there unfortunately I really wanted to film him saying that and the tank was broken down and you know parts are hard to get up there and they were I think they didn't need it at that time so so anyone any last questions um how long would it take for you to tell the story that you said was really good about catching Oh like 35 seconds all right go oh so I guess the zerg and Nikita got in a speed boat and they went up some River nearby they had to get far enough because there's a lot of poaching around chair ski so I had to get far enough up some river where there wasn't poaching and then Sergey like they see a moose a mother moose and a baby moose on an island and Sergei like pulls up to the island and tells Nikita like ok Nikita go chase those moose until they run into the water and I'll grab the baby out of the water and Nikita goes like running across the island and the mother moose turns around when she sees them and rather than like running and jumping in the water she charges him and Cirie and Nikita's like ah my father told me to do it he must know what he's talking about and I guess the moose like didn't actually encounter him and finally they jumped in the water and then Nikita I guess jumped in the river after them to keep chasing him out and Sergei pulled up in a speedboat and grabbed the baby moose out of the water and then dragged his son in after him there uh like a live a very boring life the Zima like like it like you pointed out they may be crazy but they make stuff happen like they definitely make stuff happen the mark of the innovator thank you very much Luc I was wonderful you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 37,452

Rating: 4.8425198 out of 5

Keywords: Luke Griswold-Tergis, ted talk, tedx talks, TEDxConstitutionDrive, fimmaker, ted talks, tedx talk, History, documentary, TEDxConstitutionDrive2014, ted x, TEDx, ted, Mammoth (Organism Classification), tedx

Id: wO0wyICAAqg

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Thu May 29 2014