Luis remained where he was, gazing after them.
As the last mammoth passed out of view, the director sighed. “That’s a wrap, everyone. Well done!”
As Luis returned to the group, Sera gave him a hug. “They’ll be all right now, won’t they?”
Luis exchanged a glance with Estelle.
“That’s up to us,” he said. “All of us.”
The End
Author’s note
If you enjoyed Project Hannibal, please, please leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads or your favorite site.
Like all science fiction, Project Hannibal is a mix of fantasy and reality. Here is some of the reality:
Depression
Depression isn’t a bad mood or a sign of weakness, it’s a serious medical condition that affects many, many people at some point in their lives.
In clinical depression, the body chemistry goes haywire, suppressing the feelings of hope and joy that most people take for granted. Depression doesn’t respond to logic. No amount of looking on the bright side, counting blessings, or being told to “cheer up” can break the depressed person’s cycle of unproductive thoughts and feelings that life will never get better.
Life will get better, but it may take time. Counseling and medication can help.
If you or a loved one is depressed, help is available.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline:
In the US, dial 1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255) (or, beginning July 2022, dial 988)
National Alliance on Mental Illness: https://www.nami.org/
WebMD: https://www.webmd.com/depression/
Anxiety and Depression Association of America: https://adaa.org/
For an online depression screening tool: https://screening.mhanational.org/screening-tools/depression
The role of permafrost in climate change
The Arctic is one of the largest carbon sinks in the world, trapping 1,400 gigatons of carbon in the permafrost—about twice the amount of carbon currently contained in Earth’s atmosphere. Thawing the permafrost will release the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, with a cascade effect on the acceleration of planetary warming. It’s no exaggeration to say that protecting the permafrost is vital to human survival on Earth.
Mammoths
Most people imagine all mammoths were huge. The Columbian mammoth truly was: thirteen feet at the shoulder and weighing a massive eight to ten tons (for comparison, a male African elephant tops out at six to seven tons). The Columbian mammoth had a bare hide like modern elephants and lived in temperate and tropical areas of North America.
The iconic woolly mammoth that is the subject of Project Hannibal was the size of modern elephants. They roamed the fringes of glaciated areas in the northern hemisphere. A few island-living mammoths developed into dwarfed varieties—some no bigger than sheep.
Most mammoths died out 10,000 years ago, although a few pockets survived until the relatively recent four to six thousand years ago. It is likely that changing climate and predation by humans contributed to their extinction.
Resurrecting mammoths
Mammoths are unique among the iconic extinct mammals in part because we have a wealth of biological material from mammoth carcasses that have been encased in Arctic ice since the last ice age. Efforts are underway to reconstruct mammoth genomes with an eye to the possible revival of mammoths. Among those efforts are the Woolly Mammoth Revival project at Harvard University, headed by George Church, the Pleistocene Park Project in Russia under Sergey and Nikita Zimov, and cloning innovations by South Korea’s Hwang Woo-Suk and Japan’s Akira Iritani.
None of these scientists bears the least resemblance to the fictional Henri Anjou, Ginger Kim, or Nikodim Zhurov.
A major purpose of these de-extinction efforts is to protect the permafrost.
Without large animals to compact and scrape away thick insulating layers of winter snow, extreme winter cold does not penetrate the soil. That fact, coupled with significantly warmer summers, accelerates the melting of the permafrost and the release of greenhouse gases that have been trapped for millennia. From a global carbon perspective, the carbon release from melting of the world’s permafrost is equivalent to burning all the world’s forests 2 ½ times.
—Revive & Restore, https://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-mammoth/
There are many, many hurdles to cross before reviving even a single mammoth would be feasible. Despite the wealth of mammoth remains, none of them contain an intact and viable cell suitable for cloning.
Even if the mammoth genome were fully understood and replicated, to produce a mammoth embryo, the genome would have to be inserted into an egg harvested from the mammoths’ nearest living relative, the Asian elephant—itself an endangered species. Egg harvesting from an elephant would be a complex, never-before-tried procedure that could be fatal for the elephant.
Then there’s the problem of gestation. Elephants have a hard time reproducing as it is—to divert a viable elephant mom into a risky two-year mammoth pregnancy with a low probability of success would be irresponsible at best. My fictional Project Hannibal solved this problem by using an artificial gestation system of tanks of amniotic fluid—something we are nowhere close to figuring out.
Finally, there’s the problem of providing the first revived mammoths with a social support system. Elephants are herd animals with a sophisticated, complex social life. Would a baby mammoth be adopted into a herd of elephants? Would it thrive to become a viable herd member and parent, able to help raise a generation of revived mammoths? We have no idea. We have no way to know what mammoth behavior was like. The significant behavioral differences between species as closely related as African and Asian elephants suggests that there is a lot to know.
Alaska
All the characters in this story are fictional. In addition, Alaska Eagle Med, the Rainbow and Dirty Dog Rivers, and the villages of Rainbow, Cody, and Mankeeta are all fictional, the product of an overactive imagination.
The Dalton Highway is real, as are the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the spectacular Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.
Alaska has more active volcanos than the rest of the US combined. But there is no Mount Taktuq,
