The permafrost of Siberia is not ordinary ground.

It extends hundreds of metres below the surface, held at sub-zero temperatures year-round, never thawing. Rainwater seeps in and freezes. Animals die on the surface, sink, and freeze. Root systems push downward and freeze. For tens of thousands of years, this land has been taking things in and giving nothing back.

In 1977, Soviet geologists working in the Kolyma River basin pulled a young mammoth from the permafrost. It was approximately six months old when it died. Its fur was intact. Its eyes were still present. Its stomach contained traces of its mother's milk. Scientists named it Dima. It was not a fossil — fossilisation is the process by which bone is replaced by mineral over millions of years. Dima was frozen. It was a real animal, preserved intact by time.

After Dima, similar discoveries followed. Some mammoths were found in even better condition — blood that remained liquid after thawing, tissue that had not decomposed. Scientists extracted DNA. Research teams are now actively pursuing mammoth de-extinction: not as science fiction, but as a funded, ongoing scientific project. The permafrost had preserved that possibility too.

When the mammoth disappeared from Siberia, humans had already been living here for tens of thousands of years. They hunted mammoths, built shelters from their bones, carved tools and ornaments from their ivory. After the mammoths were gone, the ivory stayed in the ground. Now, as temperatures rise and the permafrost begins to thaw, the ivory is returning to the surface — not excavated, but emerging on its own. Hunters and herders along the Siberian rivers find it on the riverbanks: sometimes a complete tusk, sometimes fragments, sometimes with bone nearby.

The colour and texture of mammoth ivory fossil depends on how long it spent in the permafrost and what minerals surrounded it. Some pieces are ivory-white. Some are brown. Some are deep amber. Some carry a blue-green mineralised layer — the trace of phosphorite that seeped in over millennia. No two pieces are the same, because no two pieces have spent the same time underground. The material is harder than modern ivory, and more brittle. Carvers work slowly, with lighter tools, recalibrating the angle and pressure for each piece. The material does not allow haste.

Beneath the same frozen ground, there is something else.

In the mountain ranges around Lake Baikal, nephrite deposits run through the rock — Russian nephrite, deep in colour, close to the green of spinach, from one of the rarest deposit sites in the world. Like the mammoth ivory, it is something this land has held for a very long time. The difference is only in how: one preserved in ice, the other locked in stone.