One of the more outlandish proposals came from a Soviet scientist named Mikhail Gorodsky, who called for positioning an artificial dust ring—similar to Saturn’s rings—around Earth, to create a heat dome over the poles that would raise temperatures to the point that the permafrost would vanish entirely. In the mid-fifties, Mikhail Kim, an engineer who had first arrived in Norilsk as a Gulag prisoner, devised a more practical solution. His idea was to build on top of cement piles driven as far as forty feet into the permafrost. The piles would elevate a building’s foundation, keeping it from warming the ground below and allowing cold air to penetrate deep into the soil. An Arctic construction boom followed.
Soviet engineers came to treat vechnaya merzlota as exactly that: eternal, stable, unchanging. “They believed they had conquered permafrost,” Dmitry Streletskiy, a professor at George Washington University, said. “You could construct a five- or nine-story building on top of piles and nothing happened. Everyone was happy.” But, Streletskiy went on, “that infrastructure was meant to serve thirty to fifty years, and no one could imagine that the climate would change so dramatically within that span.”
By 2016, a regional official had declared that sixty per cent of the buildings in Norilsk were compromised as a result of permafrost thaw. On May 29, 2020, a fuel-storage tank belonging to Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia’s largest mining companies, cracked open, spilling twenty-one thousand tons of diesel into nearby waterways and turning the Ambarnaya River a metallic red. Executives at the company said that the damage had been contained. But Georgy Kavanosyan, a hydrogeologist based in Moscow, who has a popular YouTube channel, travelled to Norilsk and took samples farther north, from the Pyasina River, which empties into the Kara Sea. He found pollutant concentrations two and a half times permitted levels, threatening fish stocks and ecosystems for thousands of miles.
The Kremlin could not ignore the scale of the disaster, which Greenpeace compared to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In February, 2021, the state ordered Norilsk Nickel to pay a two-billion-dollar fine, the largest penalty for environmental damage in Russian history. The company had said that the piles supporting the tank failed as the permafrost thawed. An outside scientific review found that those piles had been improperly installed, and that the temperature of the soil was not regularly monitored. In other words, human negligence had compounded the effects of climate change. “What happened in Norilsk was a kind of demonstration of how severe the problem can be,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a profe
