ИСТИНА

What was once an old airport runway in the Siberian village of Churapcha, is now a useless swampy field. Thawing permafrost is to blame. From buildings and roads to pipelines and storage facilities – countless structures built atop northern Russia’s permafrost are collapsing… as the earth heats up and the ice beneath their foundations melts. The personal impact on residents is clear… UPSOT: " We have everything flowing here under the house. We have the permafrost here, so the house goes up and down." And the costs keep on mounting. According to Yakutsk's Melnikov Permafrost Institute, Russia could face $97 billion in infrastructure damages by 2050, if the rate of warming continues. THIS EARTH GRAPHIC "Unfortunately, these kinds of problems are being observed everywhere. There isn't a single settlement in Russia's Arctic where you wouldn't find a destroyed or deformed building." Alexei Maslakov is a permafrost scientist at Moscow State University. He explained that when the Russian Arctic was developed in the 1960 and 70s, construction regulations did not take into account the changing natural environment "Buildings stand on stilts and are held together by the freezing force of the permafrost with the stilts in its foundation. The engineers, when they created these buildings calculated the number of stilts and their depth in relation to a certain permafrost temperature. // It was implied that permafrost temperatures were always stable, and they did not change. Only a few decades later, it became clear that the permafrost temperature was as much a changing factor as the air temperature."