A Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mammoth-tusk-hunters-russia-china

by herendin2 • 7 years ago

55 22 7 years ago

wired.co.uk

ofrzeta• 7 years ago

Related, more and better pics: https://www.boredpanda.com/mammoth-tusk-hunting-russia/

kabouseng• 7 years ago

And copyright infringed.

wooger2• 7 years ago

Wired have the cheek to ask you to turn off your ad blocker 'to fund their journalism' too!

trymas• 7 years ago

Article from original author: https://www.rferl.org/a/the-mammoth-pirates/27939865.html

kirstenbirgit• 7 years ago

This is so disturbing. Soil that have been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years is just now thawing. Worrying.

Permit• 7 years ago

I think you’re off by an order of magnitude. Mammoths were around as recently as 4,000 years ago. For reference that’s about when the Egyptian pyramids were being built.

tempguy99993• 7 years ago

His point was soil thawing, not the timespan of mammoths.

mirimir3• 7 years ago

This has been going on for over a decade.

And it's not just China.

The ban on ivory is the driver.

Cthulhu_• 7 years ago

The demand for ivory is the driver, the ban wouldn't be necessary if elephants weren't poached (and are being poached) to extinction.

mirimir3• 7 years ago

Yes, totally.

But the driver for this is arguably the ban. From what I've heard, people weren't using much mammoth ivory before the ban. However, permafrost thawing due to climate change has certainly made it easier to dig up.

It is sad, though, that the availability of mammoth ivory complicates enforcement of the ivory ban. Ideally, it could reduce demand for elephant etc ivory.

I'm sure that C-14 dating would work, but it's still expensive.

tempguy99993• 7 years ago

I've seen these pics before and have noted that, given tusks are teeth and have a large amount of phosphorus in them, surely these buried tusks must have extracted then locked up an enormous amount of bio-available phosphorus which must(?) have seriously limited that plant nutrient.

Any thoughts from biologists?

lawlessone2• 7 years ago

Everything they left behind – mammoth skulls and bones – was consumed by the elements.

that's a shame.

bloogsy• 7 years ago

Grim and disturbing for multiple reasons. It's deeply scary to me that the permafrost is melting like this and it also makes for uneasy reading to see that interesting archaeological finds are being sold off to make trinkets or simply left to deteriorate if they have no value. We're burning the world and then scrabbling around to sell the ashes.

leguminous• 7 years ago

The article focuses on China, but people in America are buying some of this stuff, too. Some (mostly boutique) American guitar manufacturers offer mammoth ivory parts.

It's kind of depressing how many ethically challenging materials are used in musical instruments and how little buyers seem to care about it. Or rather, how little buyers seem to care about the ethical problems--exotic (and often endangered) materials are seen as highly desirable.

wooger2• 7 years ago

It's almost as if to accumulate the wealth to afford a musical instrument made of exotic ivory parts (with no effect on sound) requires a certain lack of ethics in the first place.

jolmg• 7 years ago

This reminds me of this tangentially related movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammoth_(2009_film)

A Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush

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