evought's Journal: Berezovka Mammoth and Catastrophic Climate Change

The frozen woolly mammoth discovered near the Berezovka River in Siberia (1901) was mentioned in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, a dramatization of catastrophic climate change and is an anecdote that I have used on several occasions myself to indicate that climate change from global warming or other forces need not be smooth. After mentioning it in a post today, I did some online searching and found that much of what I understood about the event may be wrong.

My first encounter with the frozen mammoth was in the early nineties while going to school for my Environmental Science degree. I was reading journals related to climate change models and came across a study of the Berezovka Mammoth. Unfortunately, I no longer have the citation, but the article was in a credible, peer-reviewed journal.

The main points of the article were as follows:

• The mammoth was found frozen and intact in Siberia.
• Little or no tissue damage (from freezer burn) was present. In fact, meat was so well preserved that it was fed to sled dogs.
• Deep freezing of a creature the size of a mammoth without freezer burn would require temperatures below -150 degrees Fahrenheit.
• The mammoth had the remains of plants (grasses, leaves, and buttercups) in the mouth and stomach, indicating that it died during a warm season in a non-frozen area.

The article then went on to present several possible explanations for the sudden deep-freeze of a mammoth, favoring one involving volcanic outgassing of CO2. The idea was that the rapidly expanding gas supercooled the surrounding area and froze the mammoth. I was highly skeptical at the time of the volcano theory, but the image of the frozen mammoth with buttercups in its mouth stuck with me.

Another theory, actually more credible, was presented in The Day After Tomorrow, involving a rotating super-storm system drawing down supercooled air from the upper atmosphere at the cusp of a sudden climate change. This is a somewhat more plausible idea because it answers the question of why, if the mammoth froze suddenly in a relatively warm area, it did not just thaw, at least partly, in following years. A long term climate change answers that question very neatly.

Here is the problem: in trying to find a reference to the original paper I read, I cannot find any credible (Internet) source which suggests that the mammoth actually was deep frozen or supports the idea that there was no dessication, decomposition, or tissue damage. I can, however, find several pages (such as this one) which quote extensively from the original paleontologist's notes and publications, which indicate significant decay and muscles shrunk from dessication (as if from "freezer burn"). Interestingly, there is support for the idea that dogs ate 10,000 year-old meat, but then, my dog eats rabbit turds.

Other mammoth findings do not help much. Although many skeletons and tusks have been found, only four (five?) have been found frozen and relatively in tact. None, however, appear to have been deep frozen, but rather slowly frozen in cold mud or gravel. The recently discovered Jarkov Mammoth has undergone significant decay, including the total destruction of its brain.

Anyway, the "mystery of the frozen mammoths" for me may have become much less puzzling. I need to spend some time with Inter-Library Loan and see if I can get hold of some credible off-line material.