10,000 years underground,

Siberia's permafrost is melting, and it is revealing a fortune in mammoth ivory. Yakutia holds most of the world's fossil mammoth tusks, with estimates ranging from 70 to 90 percent of the global supply. A single well preserved tusk can stretch 4 meters, weigh over 100 kilograms, and sell for millions of rubles. The region's Yedoma sediments, ancient ice rich soils built up since the last Ice Age, are estimated to hold between 140,000 and 200,000 tons of mammoth tusks in northern Yakutia alone. As rivers and coastlines thaw faster each year, more tusks surface, and local hunters and prospectors comb the terrain to find them before anyone else does. Mammoth ivory has become a legal substitute for elephant ivory in carving markets across Asia, fetching hundreds of dollars per kilogram locally and far more once carved and sold abroad. That has turned parts of Yakutia into a cottage industry built on climate change, and it raises new questions about how a warming Arctic is reshaping both wildlife economics and the ethics of the ivory trade. Follow for more! ❤️ #life #nature #Outdoors #earth #ocean