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we could bring a woolly mammoth back
from extinction hypothetically but why
would we want to do that the Ice Age
that they thrived in disappeared long
ago transformed by thousands of years of
natural climate change they would have
nowhere to go and you go through all
that work just to put them in zoos seems
kind of pointless I mean most kids just
go to the zoo to see look at the
Penguins who I can put my penny in this
machine and roll it and then it flattens
and becomes as we're designed but some
researchers think that by cloning a
woolly mammoth and reintroducing it to
its former stomping ground they can help
us stop catastrophic climate change good
stuff producer matt weber shows us how
bringing back the past might help us
save the future Great Scott 12,000 years
ago the world was a very different place
this was the Pleistocene the planet was
much colder by as much as 10 degrees
much of the northern hemisphere lay
buried under miles continent-wide ice
sheets and humanity had just begun its
slow occupation of the world this was
the world of the woolly mammoth the end
of their world in fact with the
recession of the world's glaciers and
the intrusion of human hunting parties
the woolly mammoths would soon be
extinct although a small population hung
on in the northern islands of Siberia
well into the time of the Pharaohs in
Egypt the world they inhabited was
already long gone but there is an
ambitious geoengineering project in
Siberia today with the intention of
resurrecting the woolly mammoth it is
called Pleistocene Park and like the
fictional Jurassic Park its aim is to
bring back an extinct ecosystem much of
Siberia today is made up of dense remote
forests growing in soft mafi ground but
back in the Pleistocene it was grassland
wide open grasslands were the dominant
feature in the Earth's landscape back
then this is where the woolly mammoth
thrived in the intervening millennia as
the climate change these grasslands gave
away to other ecosystems in the lifetime
of our planet ecosystems and habitats
have always been in a state of flux
nothing is permanent far from the
exception extinction and gradual change
are constant and the High Arctic
Siberia is changing again rising global
temperatures are melting the permafrost
present at these latitudes not only is
this phenomenon turning large swaths of
the area into so
drunken forest retrieves begin to list
as if drunk unable to keep themselves
anchored in the newly thawed soil the
warming of the permafrost threatens to
exasperate global warming further by
releasing stores of carbon and methane
trap for eons and the underlying soil
and methane is a much worse greenhouse
gas than co2 it traps about 10 times the
heat energy a mass release of methane
from the once frozen Siberian permafrost
could abruptly accelerate global warming
and this could lead to a hypothetical
event called the clathrate gun a large
reserve of methane can be found frozen
in the Arctic sea bed this is a methane
clathrate basically a form of methane
that is trapped in crystalline ice at
the bottom of the polar seas an
unchecked greenhouse effect could warm
up the oceans enough to melt the ice and
send the methane shooting into the
atmosphere but this ever happened
there'd be no way to stop it like trying
to put a fired bullet back into the
chamber of a gun hence clathrate gun
this has probably happened a couple
times in the Earth's past the largest
extinction event in the history of the
planet the permian-triassic extinction
where ninety-five percent of all life on
Earth perished is thought to have been
caused by a clathrate gun event and
there's evidence of this happening today
in the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia
sinkholes of them found that are most
likely the result of large out gassings
of methane in the melting permafrost but
it's not too late to stop a clathrate
gun from firing all together and that is
exactly what they're trying to do at
Pleistocene Park located in the northern
reaches of Siberia Pleistocene Park has
been slowly trying to reintroduce the
grassland habitat of 12,000 years ago
for 40 years now grassland provides a
much better sink for extracting and
storing greenhouse gases and it has a
much higher albedo meaning it reflects
more sunlight than a typical forest and
thus keeps the planet cooler these
grassland ecosystems may have played a
crucial role in regulating the waves of
glaciation that inundated our planet
over the eons. As the grassland flourished
the planet cooled and when the planet
became too cold the grassland withered
reducing the planets albedo and
releasing its store of carbon back into
the atmosphere allowing the planet to
warm up again but the best way to
maintain a grassland ecosystem is to have a
high density population of large
herbivores along with a variety of other
species the woolly mammoth played a
critical part in cultivating the
planet's vast grasslands during the
pleistocene they had eat tons of
vegetation and that kept rotting plant
material from accumulating and releasing
their carbon into the atmosphere like
their modern-day cousins giant herds of
these massive animals stomp down any
growing trees and kept the forests at
bay for now the researchers at
Pleistocene Park use ATV vehicles and
heavy machinery to crush young trees and
reshape the landscape just as the woolly
mammoths had done bringing them back
could be an efficient way to restore
these vanished grasslands wooly mammoth
bones have been found all over
Pleistocene Park a testament to their
once ubiquity in the area and we've
found woolly mammoth carcasses mummified
in the ice all over Siberia some of them
are so well-preserved we can extract
intact strands of DNA and hypothetically
we could use that DNA to clone them and
bring them back from extinction we've
been cloning mammals for over 20 years
ever since we cloned Dolly the sheep in
1996 and since Dolly we've cloned pigs
horses and bulls so there's no reason to
think we couldn't clone an elephant or a
woolly mammoth but we've never cloned an
animal as old as the woolly mammoth but
there are a few proposed methods we
could extract preserve DNA from a
mammoth carcass and insert it into the
egg cell of its closest living relative
the Asian elephant this would be a
little like growing a chimpanzee inside
of a human mother but we've done this
before the Pyrenean ibex went extinct in
2000 but researchers were able to
extract its DNA and insert it into the
egg cell of a closely related goat three
years after the entire species was
declared extinct the Pyrenean ibex was
born again but the baby only survived
for a few minutes so far we have not
found enough preserved will a mammoth
DNA to make this technique possible so
alternatively if we could find some
preserved sperm from a male mammoth we
could use it to inseminate an Asian
elephant the resulting baby would be a
hybrid but after several generations of
this technique and almost pure woolly
mammoth could be created but frozen
sperm is only viable for about 15 years
we'd have to figure out a way to use
sperm that is thousands of years old
another method would be to modify the
genome of living Asian elephants giving
them woolly mammoth characteristics like
resistance to the cold longer hair and
extra fat this method is already being
tested by Harvard scientists George
church and he successfully inserted
mammoth genes into the Asian elephants
genome although they haven't gone the
extra step and created a viable embryo.
These animals would not be woolly
mammoth they'd be something entirely new
woolly mammoths have been extinct for a
long time how they behaved in the
prehistoric past has been extensively
studied but can't be known for certain
and how they would behave today is not
guaranteed raised by surrogate parents
and scientists these newly resurrected
mammoths would have to adapt to a world
radically transformed from the one they
evolved in while Pleistocene park's
vision is grand and ambitious we might
be too naive to face the immense
complexities of our planets ecology
because drastically altering the earth
landscape to stop global warming is a
little like sticking your finger in the
barrel of a gun to prevent yourself from
being shot it would be easier and much
more likely to succeed if we just take
our finger off the trigger and put the
gun down but if we continue to do so
little to stop the increase of
greenhouse gases in our atmosphere we
may be left with few alternatives one
thing is certain we are changing the
Earth's environment in fundamental and
unpredictable ways the largest global
science experiment in human history is
well underway like the woolly mammoth we
are Pleistocene creatures we came to be
who we are in the same grasslands as
they did and like the woolly mammoths
our past behavior is not necessarily how
we have to behave in the future whether
we are able to correct our mistakes or
adapt to a world radically transformed
from the one that we evolved in will be
the choice we will have to face in the
coming decades--with or without woolly mammoths.
So what do you think should we
bring back the woolly mammoth we're
already changing the earth should we
change it further let us know in the
comments don't forget to Like and
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