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Siberia
A tenth of the world's land, and the ground beneath it is thawing
Most of the ground is frozen solid, and it is beginning to thaw. Siberia is the Asian body of Russia, running from the Ural Mountains east toward the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean south to the steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia: roughly 13 million square kilometers, nearly a tenth of the land surface of the planet, held by about 36 million people. Beneath much of it lies permafrost, ground that has stayed below freezing for millennia and that now, warming faster than almost anywhere on Earth, is slumping, cratering and venting methane. What happens in this cold, thinly peopled expanse is registered in the climate of the entire world.
Three of the great rivers of the world, the Ob, the Yenisei and the Lena, drain north across it into the Arctic, freezing at their mouths first and backing up into spring floods. The West Siberian Plain is one of the largest flat surfaces anywhere, a swampy expanse of peat bog; east of the Yenisei the land rises into the Central Siberian Plateau, and beyond that into the ranges of the Far East, where Kamchatka's Klyuchevskaya Sopka reaches 4,750 meters. Taiga, the boreal forest, blankets most of the region. Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake on Earth, holds about a fifth of the planet's unfrozen fresh water. Winter temperatures at Oymyakon fall below minus 60 Celsius.
Russian conquest began with Cossack fur traders in the sixteenth century, and Siberia has served ever since as both treasury and prison. Tsars exiled dissidents here, the Soviet state built the Gulag on the same logic, and the Trans-Siberian Railway stitched the whole distance back to Moscow. Oil, gas, nickel, diamonds and timber make the region the fiscal engine of Russia even as its towns lose people to the west. Indigenous nations — Buryats, Sakha, Evenki, Nenets and others — keep their languages and reindeer herds alive across the tundra. The word Siberia has passed into English as a synonym for banishment, which says a great deal more about outsiders than about the place.