Pleistocene Park

Pleistocene Park

Monday, June 5, 2023 - 7:00pm to 8:45pm
  • Library Hall
An eccentric Russian scientist's quixotic quest to recreate a vanished ice age ecosystem and save the world from a catastrophic global warming feedback loop.

Genius or madman? The adventure film of the year takes us on a bumpy journey to the Siberian steppes, where a Russian geophysicist wants to restore the ecosystems of the Ice Age through radical rewilding. In the mid 90s eccentric Russian scientist Sergey Zimov made the startling discovery that melting arctic permafrost threatened to release huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, potentially creating a feedback loop that will lead to runaway climate change. Impatient with world’s slow reaction to this news Zimov has single handedly begun a controversial plan to mitigate melting permafrost by reverse engineering the ‘Mammoth Steppe’ ecosystem – a now vanished ice age grassland, complete with Serengeti-like herds of roaming herbivores, which once stretched from Spain to Canada.

Run Time: 

101 min.
"Compelling...[O]ne family living in the remote Arctic on a grand quest to save humanity from impending climate catastrophe."
Anya Bernstein, Prof. Anthropology, Harvard University