Hi! My name is Bolot. I am a journalist. Based in Yakutsk. Ask me a question about the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia / Russia, and get the answer.
Yakutsk Permafrost Institute with its underground laboratory in the form of tunnel is a sort of a must-to-see sight in the capital of Siberia’s Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). It is the most visited by international guests.
The last year before The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit it became a real Mecca to international journalists, who wanted to know whether the global warming affected the life of the only city in the world, that was entirely built on permafrost.
See how frozen carcass reindeer meat will be cut into small pieces. Photos and video were done by Artem Petukhov and Katya Ipatieva (they stand behind the Adventure in Yakutia blog http://adv.yktv.ru, in Russian) specially for eYakutia.com . Thanks, guys.
Yeah, we, Yakutians, love meat. We eat them a lot. To save money, we usually buy them of big sizes, and then we think how to cut them. Praise god, there are people who are ready to help at the cost of 20 bucks for each carcass. Read more…
Amazing! I received questions from an American lady, whose given name is Summer. It’s like “Hello from summer to winter.” She was asking:
I found some amazing stories about people who were there lately as tourists and I was wondering: Somebody on a web site who was there suggested highly the North Face Himalayan suit and couldn’t recommend it enough. But I read a few other things about how high tech parkas just don’t compare to reindeer skins etc…. What would you suggest about how to dress/what to bring if I ever decide to go there? And also any other tips for being outside in the middle of winter?
A month ago the message arrived from Sweden. A horses breeding enthusiast Karl wrote:
First of all, I want to tell you how fantastic it is of you to put up this opportunities to ask questions about Yakutia.
Thanks for your positive feedback :)
Well, I´m very interested in the Yakut ponies. There is actually not so much about them on the Internet. From pictures I have seen they look a lot like Shetland ponies. Are there any of them in Europe? Or have they newer ever exported or sold any horse?
I live in Sweden and love horses. I want to know everything possible about these wonderful horses.
My reply is the following. Read more…
One of the first questions I hear from new non-Yakutian friends of mine is “What are your traditional meals?” I started my answer from the short sentence “We love frozen horse meat and frozen Arctic fishes.”
Well, I decided to start publishing posts about traditional cuisine in Yakutia. The one is dedicated to stroganina.
Stroganina is the traditional cold dish in Yakutia.
Stroganina is the first traditional dish that will be offered you to try in Yakutia in winter. It is thin long slices of frozen fresh Arctic river fishes, i.e. broad whitefishes, whitefishes, and white salmons. Read more…
As far as you know, there is no bridge over the Lena River at all. Therefore, to cross the river, locals are forced to use ferryboats from June till October and ice roads in winter, officially from the midst of December till early April.
Late April – May and late October – November are considered to be dangerous periods for crossing the river. Nevertheless, some people take the risk and as result we can periodically read news about accidents, precisely about sunken cars and trucks.
It is a must for local drivers to know ice roads requirements, and travelers are recommended to keep them in mind as well. So… Read more…
The Copenhagen Summit made climate changes topical in news. Interesting, but Yakutsk and I felt this fever as well. A couple weeks ago five western journalists arrived in Yakutsk to make reportages about the affects of global warming in Yakutsk. In the summer I helped two photographers Mathias Braschler & Monika Fischer, who searched persons with tumbledown houses for portraits to show in Copenhagen, and Jonathan Watts, a Beijin-based The Guardian correspondent.
Recently I have received similar requests from western journalists. The last one was from the Swedish Aftonbladet newspaper reporter. He asked the following questions and got my replies. Read more…
The following post can give answers to many questions regarding Oymyakon, the Pole of Cold in Siberia. The author of the post is Jordi Marqui, a Catalonian cold weather enthusiast, who has its own WP blog AmazingSnow. The article was initially published on my partner blog ColdUnited.com. Thanks, Jordi!
Talking about Ojmjakon involves talking about the cradle of the cold, at least one of the few cradles of the planet. It is known that the -71.2°C is there, like a record, but probably won’t be satisfactorily demonstrate.
I expose a graph below, courtesy of forum collegue (rs), very involved in monitoring global temperatures, which shows us the detail of the number of days (since 1943) per year that Ojmjakon has reached (even exceeded) the -60ºC. As seen at first sight, and within natural variability, the powerful years to achieve this figure are from some time ago, with the decade 1985-95 as the least conducive to these rigors. In recent years, since 2000, seems to appear the 6 again, not with the frequency of periods that are obvious in the graph, but not staying at an impossible figure as in the aforementioned decade.
In the beginning of November 2009, I wrote the post “Descending into the world’s deepest shaft in the permafrost zone.” In a few days after I received a message with a lot of questions from a Hungarian scientists Adam Soereg.
He wrote “Data from Yakutsk is extremely important, because this is the longest dataset in the Eastern Siberian region, longer than any series in the United States. Yakutsk shows an abnormally high rate of warming since the early 19th century, but what if the official values used by large agencies between 1829 and 1854 are 1.9°c lower than reality?”
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