About gophers or how much the Kolyma was filled up

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

How can a city disappear? The country? Civilization? Not just disappear, but quickly disappear. When the lithosphere shifts, sea waters collapse onto the land, tearing and grinding the rock, and already with a giant mudflow, at thousands of kilometers, they fill up what could not be washed away. Where the walls are, and where everything is buried.

The thickness of the alluvial rock in Kolyma can be determined, as it turned out, in the "gophers" or, if not humorously, through their dwellings.

Here is the character. American or Beringian ground squirrel, gopher-gopher.

Inhabitant of open landscapes - meadow and steppe areas, tundra. Distribution is limited by the presence of permafrost, therefore, the American ground squirrel usually settles on any elevations of the relief (including small hills), along the ridges of non-flooded river terraces. In the basins of the river. Yana, Indigirka and Kolyma live in areas of relict steppes. Occurs in the mountain tundra up to 1400 m above sea level.

The depth and length of burrows depends on the nature of the soil and the level of permafrost. The longest and deepest burrows are found on sandy soils: length up to 15 m, depth - up to 3 m. Near permafrost, burrows are not deeper than 70 cm.

Information off topic.

An amazing animal. Lives 3-4 years. Hibernation lasts up to 7, 5-8 months. The animals wake up and come to the surface in April-May, when there is still a constant snow cover. In autumn and spring, they are found on the surface at subzero temperatures - down to −40 ° C.

They sleep at subzero temperatures - in gopher nests the temperature in winter drops to -3 … -5 ° С. Accordingly, the body temperature of the gopher itself drops to + 10 ° C. Recent studies have shown that in hibernation, the body of gophers can cool down to minus 3.5 degrees Celsius.

About these studies of Canadian scientists, if anyone is interested, you can look at VESTI. RU

Information on the topic.

As already noted above, the depth of the burrow of the Berengi ground squirrel is no more than three meters and it settles on any elevations of the relief, along the ridges of non-flooded river terraces.

In the work "On the wintering conditions of the Berengian ground squirrel in the northeast of Asia" it is noted: "The temperature regimes of the wintering of the Beringian ground squirrels in the Upper Kolyma in 1986–1990 and 2006–2007 have been studied. Most of the habitats of the ground squirrels are among the coldest. are at a depth of 50–120 cm, the minimum ground temperatures near the nests drop to –22… –28 ° С, at temperatures below –20 ° С, ground squirrels can stay for about 3 months."

Russian scientists managed to grow a plant from biological material 32 thousand years old. This is how Stanislav Gubin, an employee of the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences, spoke about it. "In 1991, we discovered a series of fossil burrows belonging to gopher-gophers - cute and good-natured animals that are now widespread in Yakutia, Chukotka, Alaska. … passed into a buried state, that is, the material turned out to be sealed in permafrost. So, now we find these holes in the frozen walls of river, lake, sea cliffs at a depth of 20-40 meters in strata with a temperature of 7-12 degrees below zero - by in fact, we have a natural cryobank at our disposal."

Another similar message: A "package" from the Late Paleolithic period was discovered by a group of biologists at the Institute of Physicochemical Problems of Soil Science in Kolyma."Narrow-leaved smolevka" is a small shrub that still grows in North-Eastern Siberia; it was the seeds of this plant that were found at a depth of 30 meters in the burrow of a prehistoric ground squirrel.

Another report, which says that "the fruits and seeds of the narrow-leaved resin (Silene stenophylla) were extracted from the permafrost at a depth of 38 meters near the Kolyma River."

It remains to summarize. From 38 meters, minus 3 meters of the maximum depth of the gopher's burrow, and we get 35 meters of alluvial soil in Kolyma.