Collaborative Efforts of Reindeer Herders and Scientists to Uncover Arctic Warming

In the spring of 2014, Yar-Sale, a small town located on the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, experienced a tragic annual reindeer festival. An unfortunate series of weather events the previous November, including a rainstorm and a deep freeze, had led to the creation of an impenetrable ice shell covering the normally snowy tundra. This meant reindeer, unable to break through the ice to reach their primary food source, lichen, were left starving. This was a major issue as during the Siberian winter where temperatures often drop below –50° Celsius, the ground remained frozen for months later. Thousands of reindeer had already lost their lives due to starvation, and thousands more were perilously close to a similar fate.

Vasily Serotetto, a prominent reindeer herder, participated in a dialogue with scientists. He proposed a question about the predictability of such catastrophic events, referred to as seradt in the Indigenous Nenets language. He suggested advance warning of even a few days would have allowed for humane slaughter of the animals, preventing wastage of meat and fur.

For the scientists, Serotetto's proposal sparked a sense of urgency. Bruce Forbes, a biogeographer at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland, interpreted this as a plea for the scientific community to uncover the causes of these disasters. The experts in question had access to numerous satellite images of the Russian Arctic. But without detailed local reports including the timing and location of such occurrences, effectively analyzing this extensive data became a monumental task.

Since then, the scientists and local community have collaborated with the aim to better understand this phenomenon, which is pivotal to the lifestyle of local herding communities and significant to the global battle against climate change. Other than prevent herbivores from reaching their food under the ice, rain on snow can destabilize avalanches, warm the permafrost, and interfere with transportation and communication by altering the soil and vegetation conditions.

Even though the combined efforts of the communities helped to identify various causes of the horrific icing in 2013, the prediction of such devastating incidents remains a mystery.

In recent years, the potential advantages of collaboration between Indigenous and scientific communities have been recognized more and more. Forbes is involved in an interdisciplinary group of scientists working on the Arctic Rain on Snow Study (AROSS), funded by the National Science Foundation. This team is examining the reasons for rain on snow in the Arctic and its impact on local wildlife, ecology, and communities.

In September, the NSF started the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science, a research hub. This pioneering initiative aims to merge Western and Indigenous knowledge and is based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, backed by a five-year, $30-million deal.

The Indigenous inhabitants, including the Siberian reindeer herders, have vast knowledge of their local environments. Roza Laptander, a linguistic anthropologist from the Yamal Peninsula and a member of the AROSS team, works at both the University of Lapland and the University of Hamburg in Germany. Since 2006, she periodically lives within the herding communities, furthering her study.

Laptander's research reveals how the ecological understanding is rooted in the Nenets language. For example, the season’s first snow, which is often soft and deep and therefore difficult for reindeer to traverse, is known as idebya syra. The term inggyem’ syra denotes snow with ice granules and suggests the presence of high-quality lichen. The term seradt is used for events where rain falls on snow or unfrozen ground and then freezes, halting deer from feeding. The word stems from serad’’, translating to both rain and misfortune.

Traditionally, the herders could use their detailed understanding of various types of snow and ice, together with their capability to interpret weather patterns and animal behavior, to anticipate a harsh winter, says Laptander. But global warming is distorting these indications. “Their traditional ways of predicting weather do not work anymore,” she admits.

On the other hand, scientists are often trying to understand how the changes in the Arctic climate caused by global warming, such as thinning sea ice and melting permafrost, are affecting climate change and weather patterns on a global scale. To provide local communities with assistance requires input from these communities.

“Scientists might have difficulty distinguishing between different types of snow. We might just look and recognize it as snow,” says Dylan Davis, a remote sensing archaeologist at Columbia University who is also not involved in this project. “Local and Indigenous communities who interact with these conditions daily are going to be able to spot nuances that we might miss.”

That’s what happened at Yar-Sale. Forbes told Serotetto that scientists might be able to sort out what caused the 2013–14 seradt, but they needed an idea of where to begin. Serotetto pointed to a map. In a typical winter, herders migrate from north to south. When the rain-on-snow event hit, many herders were already too far south to turn back or doubted the severity of the disaster. Serotetto, a herder with decades of experience, was able to push north. He discovered that the northern peninsula was relatively unscathed.

Serotetto drew a line on the map demarcating where he had come across the edge of the ice shield. When scientists pulled up satellite images from that November day, Forbes says, “the line was exactly where he drew it.” 

That information enabled Laptander, Forbes and others on the team to begin investigating the unique confluence of sea ice levels, snow versus ice cover on land, air temperatures and precipitation that contributed to the November 2013 icing event in southern Yamal.

Melting sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas releases humid air into the atmosphere, the team found (SN: 11/15/16). That humid air can blow onto the land as rain when temperatures rise above freezing.

The answer to Serotetto’s question, though, is far from resolved. Predicting such events remains extremely challenging, Forbes says. For instance, in 2018, the North Atlantic was open water all the way to the North Pole, and rain-on-snow seemed almost inevitable. But such an event did not occur. How did conditions differ between 2013 and 2018?

Efforts to answer that question are currently on hold. First, the pandemic thwarted travel and then, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Climate research in the Russian Arctic has come to a virtual standstill, Forbes says. “Suddenly, half the Arctic is a no-go.”  

But the work in Yamal has snowballed to other Arctic regions, Forbes says. For instance, on a trip to Greenland last year, sheep farmers and reindeer herders told Forbes that they had just dealt with their first serious rain-on-snow event the previous winter. Forbes and his colleagues are hoping to apply what they learned in Yamal to better understand that event. “Now we have a data-sharing network with Indigenous informants across Arctic North America,” Forbes says.