Moscow Announces Small Program to Refreeze Permafrost under Norilsk to Prevent City’s Collapse

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 18 – The Russian government has announced a program to freeze the ground under the foundations of major buildings in Norilsk, a 170,000-strong city in the Far North, lest the ever more rapidly melting of the permafrost on which the city is built leads to their collapse (thebarentsobserver.com/ru/arktika/2021/10/v-norilske-pristupayut-k-ohlazhdeniyu-grunta-dlya-zashchity-zdaniy-ot-tayaniya).

            But the size of this program, ten million US dollars for the entire city, is far too small to save that Norilsk alone, let alone the other urban centers and pipeline routes in the Far North. Instead, ever more cities there are likely to become ghost towns and pipeline accidents increase (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/07/ghost-towns-spreading-across-russian.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/07/permafrost-melting-puts-infrastructure.html).

            Indeed, Russian experts have pointed out that Norilsk is only “the tip of the iceberg” as far as the melting of permafrost is concerned and that the collapse of infrastructure there and across the Russian North puts at risks Vladimir Putin’s grand plans for projecting Russian power into the Arctic (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/06/norilsk-tip-of-iceberg-as-millions-of.html).

            European scholars have pointed out that Moscow has been seriously underestimating the impact of global warming on the permafrost that covers the northern third of the Russian Federation and that the Russian authorities restored Soviet-era monitoring arrangements only in 2020 (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/12/moscow-seriously-underestimating-rate.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/10/moscow-finally-to-restore-system-of.html).

            In addition to the threat from subsidence as a result of the melting of the permafrost, there is another threat about which some Russian scholars have expressed concern but that the authorities have not yet taken any serious steps to address: the risk that when the ice melts, bacteria and viruses will be released into the atmosphere and spark epidemics.

            Now with the experience of covid, those concerns may contribute to more efforts to deal with the melting permafrost, although experts suggest that the costs of preventing disaster from that direction are even higher than of shoring up buildings from collapse (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-ice-will-melt-and-we-will-all-die.html).