The gate at the end of the world

The tundra of the high latitudes isn’t my area of expertise. Far from it, since I’m an archaeologist specializing in the pre-Columbian civilizations of the American southwest. So it came as a surprise when my roommate from college, Seth Parker, called me to say he’d found something that would interest me professionally.

Seth is a geologist whose Ph.D. was paid for by a scholarship from a Russian petrochemical company in exchange for seven years of work exploring for natural gas in Siberia. That’s not as tedious as it sounds, at least not to him. His area of interest is the late Permian period, and the vast traps formed by a mantle plume that nearly ended life on Earth lie over the carbon deposits that we’re using to create the same disaster again.

We’d kept up our friendship over the years, though mostly by e-mail since we were on opposite sides of the planet. But I’d have thought his work had nothing to do with me if he hadn’t insisted that I come to the Yamal Peninsula to see something he claimed would change everything.

This isn’t the language that scientists often use, and Seth isn’t the type to make wild promises. But travel to Russia is a tangle of red tape for U.S. citizens, so I didn’t expect to be able to go. He called me in late…