A group of scientists have been working on reviving the extinct woolly mammoth in an attempt to revert some of the effects of climate change.
Due to the worsening climate crisis, scientists and technology companies are coming up with new ideas to keep it stable and even revert some of the effects. One solution is bringing back the woolly mammoths who thrived in the Pleistocene age until they became extinct in the early Holocene era (The Editors of Encyclopedia).
The woolly mammoth went into extinction about 10,000 years ago and scientists are trying to bring back the animal to help repair our damaged ecosystem. Mammoths were some of the primary contributors to the positive disruption of the tundra landscape. They would destroy shrubs, mosses, and trees, ultimately leaving more room for grass to grow. Grass takes in far less sunlight than trees, which brings less warmth into the top layer of soil, allowing greenhouse gasses to stay trapped in the ground with permafrost. Without the presence of woolly mammoths in the tundra and the increased release of greenhouse gasses from humans, permafrost has begun to thaw. Permafrost is frozen soil that lies beneath the top layer of the ground (Denchak). Mammoths also helped to preserve the permafrost by moving snow around, thus preventing it from insulating and heating the permafrost (Mann).
This idea was first shared with the public in 2013, when Dr. George Church presented the idea at a TEDx event to the National Geographic Society. Around that time, scientists were learning how to reconstruct the DNA of extinct species. He argued that “Mammoths are hypothetically a solution to this.”(Zimmer, 2021)
Colossal, a Bioscience company, got $15 million in private funding to bring the woolly mammoths back to Siberia. The company will experiment in labs in Boston and Dallas and will support research in Harvard biologist George Church’s lab. Eriona Hysolli, the head of biological sciences at Colossal, says that “the tools are there” for their research and “it’s just about scaling it up” (Lazzaro). Hysolli, Church, and Church’s team have spent six years working in Church’s lab developing novel genetic tools for making genome editing more flexible. Colossal will be editing elephant’s DNA and adding mammoth traits like dense hair and thick fat for withstanding cold. At first, the idea was to implant embryos into surrogate female elephants, but he realized that building a herd would be impractical. The researchers are optimistic about being able to produce the embryos of the elephants/mammoths, but other specialists are a bit skeptical about Colossal’s study. “There’s tons of trouble everyone is going to encounter along the way,” said Beth Shapiro, a paleogeneticist at the University of California Santa Cruz and the author of How to Clone a Mammoth (Zimmer, 2021). Joseph Frederickson, a paleontologist, admits he believes the new technologies could be better used to prevent the currently endangered species from extinction or reintroduce older traits into species lacking genetic diversity. Frederickson explains that the eco-system has likely already adapted to life without woolly mammoths, and bringing them back could destabilize the order: “There were plants and animals that were living alongside the mammoth that are now long gone or have drastically shrunk in their range, and just bringing back the mammoth won’t bring those back” (Neuman). Despite the controversy over Colossal’s research, they are continuing to make progress, and the company is predicting that their research will be finished in about a decade. It may not be the solution to stopping climate change, but it is a step in the right direction. Even if the experiment is unsuccessful, specialists claim that it will still help humanity and open the doors for more scientific opportunities and discoveries (Zimmer, 2021).
Works Cited
Denchak, Melissa. “Permafrost: Everything You Need to Know.” NRDC, 26 June 2018, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/permafrost-everything-you-need-know.
The Editors of Encyclopedia. “Mammoth.” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/animal/mammoth-extinct-mammal.
Lazzaro, Sage. “Colossal Wants to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth.” VentureBeat, 13 September 2021, https://venturebeat.com/2021/09/13/colossal-wants-to-bring-the-woolly-mammoth-back-to-life/.
Mann, Paul. “Can Bringing Back Mammoths Help Stop Climate Change?” Smithsonian Magazine, 14 May 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/can-bringing-back-mammoths-stop-climate-change-180969072/.
Neuman, Scott. “Scientists Say They Could Bring Back Woolly Mammoths. But Maybe They Shouldn’t.” NPR, 15 September 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/14/1036884561/dna-resurrection-jurassic-park-woolly-mammoth
Carl Zimmer. “A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth” The New York Times, 14 September 2021
Desk Editor Feedback:
In the future, there’s no need to cite all of the sources in MLA format, but we would prefer if you could hyperlink them in your in-text citations.
The article included all of the necessary background information as well as a solid description of the project — great job with this! The only major adjustment that I would suggest is reordering 2 of the paragraphs (see comments).