Environmental degradation in the land of the Samoyed Peoples

Before the city of Norilsk was founded in 1935 and the mining industry was established in the middle course of the river Ienisei and surrounding areas in Northern Siberia the region was inhabited by several peoples collectively called Samoyeds.

The Samoyeds were people who lived in small communities and depended on reindeer husbandry, hunting and fishing.

The reindeer had been domesticated approximately in the tenth century and since then were used as a means of transport and to obtain milk.

Some villages consumed their meat while others avoided sacrificing domestic reindeer, and only took advantage of the milk.

To obtain the meat, they hunted the wild reindeer. Fishing was done through the ice in lakes and rivers frozen in winter and hunting by traps, bows and arrows and spears.

The main Samoyed people of the Nordic region of Siberia is the ethnic group of the Nenets.

Their ancestral domains are located from the peninsula of Taymir to the peninsula of Kanin in the inferior basins of the rivers Obi and Ienisei. The original population who probably amounted to more than 100,000 inhabitants, stretched over a vast area of ​​more than 1 million square kilometers.

Life changed in the Yamal region when the czarist Russian empire extended its territory throughout Siberia and even more so when the Soviet Union government decided to expand the mining and hydrocarbon producing industry in the region.

During this period of occupation and acculturation, the Nenets were victims of successive campaigns to abandon their traditional religions.

The first attempt of forced conversion to Christianity was in 1824. These missions continued during the Tsarist era, making the Orthodox Church the majority of the population. Later, during the Soviet period, the population of the Nenets was subjected to the depreciation of their traditions through institutionalized education, neglecting the vertebral elements of their identity.

The Nenets have reacted against this degradation and cultural assimilation by forming political identity organizations. One of them is Yasavey (those who know the way) who has carried out intense activities to defend his rights

Because of these changes many Nenets abandoned the traditional life and started working in the new mining and industrial plants.

The intense exploitation of gas in the area produced some unexpected effects in the Yaman peninsula.

In 2014, a sinkhole was discovered in the southern section of the peninsula. People were wondering about the cause of this unusual geomorphological feature.

A spokesperson for the Yamal branch of the Emergencies Ministry said, "We can definitely say that it’s not a meteorite”.

According to Andrei Plekhanov of the Scientific Research Center of the Arctic, Andrei Plekhanov, the sinkhole was the result of a "buildup of excessive pressure" underground because of warming regional temperatures in that portion of Siberia.

Simultaneously some tests conducted by Plekhanov's team showed unusually high concentrations of methane near the bottom of the sinkhole.

If the intense exploitation of natural gas fields is taken into consideration we should not be surprised that in nearby zones destabilizing effects may have taken place.

Loss of pressure in the gas containing layers may result in the collapse of the local terrane upper levels producing large sinkholes wherever the conditions were appropriate.

Clearly, the extraction of hydrocarbons in the peninsula has affected the local geomorphology and ecosystems.

Thanks to the Yamal riches, presently, Russia has emerged in the international arena as one of the largest producers ol hydrocarbon of the world.  

Certainly, the Nenets are not the beneficiearies of these geological resources of their traditional lands.
From "Chronicles of Human Peripecie", Danilo Anton, Piriguazu Ediciones.

Nightmare in the Siberian Arctic: 

Norilsk, Russia's most polluted and coldest city

Russia colonizing in Siberia were related to the expansion of the Russian czarist state from principles of the XVII century. 

To a large extent, this advance was motivated by the fur trade. The process was followed by colonizing migrations that gradually modified the regional demographics.

The changes were accelerated by the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway, whose laying began in 1891 by a decision of Czar Alexander II and culminated in 1916 shortly before the Bolshevik revolution.

 The trans-Siberian railway system made it possible to know and have access to other natural resources besides skins and wood, in particular deposits of metallic minerals, gas and oil. 

In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet state, which had replaced the Tsarist power, promoted the occupation of the Nordic and Arctic lands to obtain its mineral wealth.

The most important reservoir was discovered in the 1930s(1) in the Ienisei and Pyasina river basins in the far north. In them important volumes of nickel, and to a lesser extent of copper, cobalt, platinum and palladium were found. 

On this potential economic basis the Soviet government decided to establish a mining and industrial complex in northern Siberia called Norilsk.

During the following years immigration  to the new city was favored and its population grew considerably. 

At the same time, a port was built on the Ienisei River in the town of Dudinka about a hundred kilometers from the mining complex. Dudinka receives the minerals wholly or partly processed from Norilsk for export by river and sea to the port of Murmansk in northwestern Russia.

In less than half a century, due to the economic importance of mining activities, the city of Norilsk grew to have a maximum of 183,000 inhabitants in 1982. 

After that year there was the local mining industry suffered stagnation and the city entered a period of demographic decline that has continued to the present. In the 2005 census the population had declined to 135,000 people.

The geographical site of Norilsk has a very rigorous climate. The average January temperature is -33 degrees C and the annual average is -10 degrees C. There has been a minimum temperature of -58 degrees C. 

For this reason the natural ecosystems of the region are composed of low density boreal forests-northern taiga(2)- and areas of frozen subsoil (permafrost) with herbaceous summer vegetation devoid of trees (tundra) (3).

Due to the mining and industrial activity, the original ecosystems around Norilsk suffered greatly from the environmental point of view. There is practically not a single tree within a radius of 48 kilometers from the plants and quarries. The site has been stripped of its soils and surface formations.

There are large open-air excavations and stabilization ponds covering more than 10,000 hectares and the drainage has been completely modified with deep degradation of nearby Pyasino Lake and its river emissary, the Pyasina River. 

It is estimated that 4 million tonnes of cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, arsenic, selenium and zinc have been released into the air.

Norilsk is the main producer of acid rain in Russia and its emissions affect an area of ​​more than 100,000 km2 .

From "Chronicles of Human Peripecie", Danilo Antón, .Piriguazú Ediciones.

1 The city of Norilsk was founded in 1935, but mining began four years later.

2 The word taiga comes from a Russian word that in turn derives from the yakuto and means "all uninhabited territory, covered with forests".

3 Tundra is derived from a Finnish word tunturia meaning "plain without trees".

4 The Pyasina River flows into the Kara Sea (Arctic Sea)