Today I Learned (TIL)

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TIL that there is a flourishing business consisting of digging up mammoth tusks from the Siberian permafrost and selling it to China, as a substitute for prohibited elephant ivory. (www.nhm.ac.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, they're probably destroying a lot of Siberian ice to do this, so it might even have the same ecological impact as something like mining, I think

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yeah. Permafrost has a lot of carbon stored in it. The more digging humans do, the more is released into the atmosphere.

It also starts a chain reaction and causes more to melt.

https://youtu.be/HvKpnaXYUPU

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Just in general, mammoth fossils hold a lot of information that could tell us about the history of the local environment of those areas or new insights into the creatures' lives as well. Also it's not like more of this finite resource is still being produced or anything.