The Western Siberian plain (WSP) is the most bogged region of the World - in some parts up to 70-80% of its territory is covered by bogs, in overall 1 million km². Western Siberia acts as a terrestrial sink of atmospheric carbon and thus plays an important role in the global cycle of carbon. For thousands of years the vast taiga forest and pristine peatland areas south of the permafrost area have been sequestrating substantial amounts of atmospheric carbon. The biggest at the World – Great Vasiugan Mire GVM (total area – 7.5 million hectare settles down in its territory. This unique mire representing the object of a nature of the world value, comparable on the importance and a rank with the lake Baikal. The peat stock accumulated in the GVM is around 18 billion tons of dry organic matter, representing 16.5% of total peat stock deposits in the WSP (Vaganov etc., 2005). According to our investigations carried out in the Western Siberian Plain, contrasting processes are occurring in the Southern and Northern parts of the region. In the south, bogs are expanding in the taiga zone and there is progressive swamping which leads to forest death. As a result, in this part of Western Siberia bogs act as a kind of “global cooler” due to carbon sequestration in their peat layers. The situation in the northern part of the Western Siberian Plain is completely opposite. The bogs there are reducing their area and the forest-tundra area is being subjected to thermokarst activity and colonization of bogs by trees. Due to incredibly increased thermokarst activity, two contrast processes are observed here - a) increase of lake surface due to melting of lakes' coasts, and - b) decrease of surface area or disappearance of lakes due to water escape downstream the hydrological network. Moreover, thermokarst processes increase carbon effluxes, especially from the small lakes. This is likely to be linked to the recent climatic changes and, undoubtedly, with global warming.
Complex research of the Arctic zone, as well as its development is impossible without a thorough understanding of the fundamental feedbacks of permafrost and climate. Mires, as a dominant landscape type and “permafrost protector”, play a crucial role in this connection.
According to SWIPA report (2011) recent work has shown that carbon pools in permafrost soils are much larger than previously recognized: around 1400 to1850 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon are located in terrestrial permafrost regions, mainly in northern mires. That’s why it’s so important to study permafrost feedback to climate through trace gas emissions and albedo changes of mire landscapes.
Study of permafrost state in the era of climate instability is of particular actuality. This is especially true for the vast waterlogged subarctic areas of Western Siberia, which is one of the hotspots of global warming on our planet (Haeseler, 2012). It’s not surprising that climatic changes here are more dramatic compared with other northern regions such as Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska, and changes in permafrost landscapes are more notable due to the severe continental climate (Kirpotin et al, 2011). Understanding climate-permafrost system requires knowledge of climatic effects on carbon (C) cycling and greenhouse gas dynamics in coupled land-water-atmospheric systems, and in-turn, how these feed back into the climate-permafrost system.
In Siberia, the "space equal time" equation is very important in a climate change and permafrost state perspective, as by moving in space we can study time. This particularity combined with a strong continentality makes Siberia a unique and good proxy to study other northern regions, and anticipate what would happen with global warming. Due to its size, Siberia can be called a "Universe" in itself, and any project driven there has a universal scale.
Owing to the development of oil and gas complex Western Siberia in comparison with other Arctic regions of the planet has the most developed infrastructure: roads, oil and gas pipelines, pads, power lines, gas-compressor stations, cities and towns of oil and gas industry worker. Already today this infrastructure undergo a significant damage from climate impacts, accompanied by permafrost degradation, and authorities in the region together with the largest oil and gas corporations have to spend huge amounts of money to keep it going (Anisimov et al., 2001; Kirpotin et al., 2009). On the other hand, just this well-developed infrastructure (good road network) provides unprecedented access to the region for researches and field experiments, making them significantly cheaper than in other northern regions, which exploit small aircraft or helicopters. Thus, Western Siberia is a key region and the most convenient site for studying both the fundamental questions of interaction of climate and permafrost and considering the practical aspects of these changes and evaluation of these social impacts. Just today Western Siberia faced with such powerful changes in the natural environment which other northern regions of the world will face in the near future with. That is why the study of climate-driven changes of natural processes in Western Siberia has exceptional global importance.