Why Siberia Is Earth's Strangest Place

Siberia is one of the largest regions on Earth, taking up a whole 9% of the planet's entire landmass. But while this vast territory is often thought of as a frigid, barely habitable wasteland, there's a lot more to Siberia than most people think. After all, we're talking about a region larger than the entire United States, a place where people have lived for tens of thousands of years, and a region that is so much more than just Eastern Russia. From evidence of an ancient cataclysm to secretive military cities, here are 15 unbelievable geography facts you never knew about Siberia. Hey, I have a book coming out in 2027 called Badlands. Stick around to the end to learn more about it. Stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, Siberia is absolutely enormous, with an area of 5.1 million square miles. The western third of Siberia, between the Urals and the Yenisei River, consists of the world's largest unbroken lowland, the vast stretch of floodplains and swamps known as the West Siberian Plain. To the east, between the rivers Yenisei and Lena, is the Central Siberian Plateau, a land of plateaus and ridges covered by taiga, bordered by the frigid tundra of the North Siberian lowland to the north and the sprawling alluvial plains of the Central Yakutian lowland to the east. The South Siberian Mountains, a series of mountain ranges that run for close to 2,000 miles along Siberia's southern edge wall these regions off from Central Asia, while the East Siberian Mountains stretch a similar distance across the Russian Far East. Beyond the East Siberian Mountains are the frigid East Siberian lowlands, the volcano-strewn Kamchatka Peninsula, and the remote Chukchi Peninsula, which make up the far eastern tip of Asia. While Siberia can be extremely cold, it's still full of life and natural beauty. Most Most of Siberia is covered by an enormous belt of taiga, cold, coniferous forests with generally poor soil dominated by spruce, larch, fir, and pine tree. Among these mighty conifers live all sorts of animal species, from moose and foxes to gray wolves and brown bears, which teem in Siberia's unspoiled wilds. Despite appearances, the Siberian taiga is actually a fairly recent development. Before about 12,000 years ago, most of Siberia was instead covered by a region of dry grassland known as the Mammoth Steppe, where ancient humans hunted woolly mammoths and other Ice Age megafauna. To the south, the Siberian taiga transitions into temperate forests and steppes. To the north, it transitions into frigid tundra. Siberia has a sub-arctic continental climate, which means Siberia's long winters get ridiculously cold, with temperatures dropping well below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, as low as negative 90 degrees in some places. But that's during the winter. During the summer, Siberia is actually pretty pleasant, with temperatures averaging in the high 60s to low 80s depending on latitude. Siberia actually has some of the world's most extreme temperature variations between the seasons, thanks to its continental climate. But across most of Siberia, summer is short, and the extreme cold lasts much longer than the more pleasant temperature. Because of these bone-chilling winter temperatures, northern Siberia has vast stretches of permafrost, some of which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. in Western Siberia is full of basalt and other igneous rocks, all part of one of Earth's greatest large igneous provinces, the Siberian Traps. Though they look pretty mundane today, these rocks are actually the remnants of an ancient apocalypse, one that brought life on Earth the closest it's ever been to total extinction. About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, a mantle plume caused a series of massive volcanic eruptions all across Siberia, which went on for about 2 million years. Floods of basaltic lava completely blanketed a vast area of land, and huge amounts of volcanic gases poured into the atmosphere. As if that wasn't bad enough, the eruptions also lit coal beds across Siberia on fire, adding an extra dose of carbon dioxide to the mix. The result was runaway global warming that caused the Great Dying, more formally known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the Earth's most devastating mass extinction. This video is sponsored by Mammut. 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At its deepest, Lake Baikal is a staggering 5,387 feet deep, which gives it an enormous volume. The lake contains more water than all of the North American Great Lakes combined, and its waters are clear, cold, and rich in oxygen. Because of this, Lake Baikal is home to aquatic animals found nowhere else on Earth, including many fish species and the Baikal seal, and its shores have been home to humans for at least 24,000 years. Humans have lived in Siberia for at least 45,000 years, migrating across vast mammoth steppe and living in nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles in the modern taiga. Siberia is home to a wealth of indigenous people with ancient histories, prominently including the Yakuts, the Buryats, the Tuvans, and the Evenki, among many others. Many of these peoples were nomadic, subsisting mainly by hunting and fishing, and formed tribes and clans organized around shamans. Unfortunately, many indigenous Siberian peoples were subject to genocide during the Russian conquest of Siberia, which saw entire ethnic groups completely wiped out. Still, many other people survived, and today there are about 1.8 million indigenous Siberians from various cultural groups. Prior to the Russian conquest, the history of Siberia was largely defined by empires from the steppes south of Siberia, most prominently in the Xiongnu and Mongol empires. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongols conquered much of southern Siberia in the early 1200s, subduing many indigenous Siberian peoples and annexing vast swathes of Taiga. Siberia formed the northern frontier of of Mongol territory, and at the height of the Mongols' power, it acted as an invasion corridor that allowed them to advance into Eastern Europe. After the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire, southwestern Siberia fell under the rule of the Golden Horde, and then the Khanate of Sibir, before ultimately the Russians moved into the region. Between 1581 and 1778, the Russians embarked on a campaign of exploration, settlement, and conquest across Siberia, eventually incorporating the entire region into the Russian Empire. Waves of Cossacks spread east, traveling along Siberia's great rivers in search of indigenous peoples to extract tribute from, followed by waves of Russian settlers who established a network of forts and towns across southern Siberia. Many indigenous peoples were coerced into giving the Russians regular tributes of fur, while others resisted and were subjected to brutal reprisals, particularly in the Far East. Most of Siberia was at least nominally under Russian rule by 1689, although in practice, The Tsar had little real authority across most of the territory. As increasing numbers of Russian settlers poured into the region, however, the indigenous Siberian populations were decimated by the spread of smallpox and other diseases, which means, at that point, Siberia came more firmly under Russian control. For most of the Russian Empire's history, the development of Siberia was hampered by the region's vast size, limited numbers of settlers, and a lack of reliable transportation. Towards the end of the 19th century, work began on a solution to that last problem. The Trans-Siberian Railway. This massive infrastructure project knit together most of the major Siberian settlements, linking Moscow with Vladivostok on Siberia's Pacific coast. Work on the railroad began in 1891, and the last stretches of the route were finished in 1916. The Trans-Siberian Railway brought new waves of settlers to Siberia and provided a boost to agriculture in the southern parts of the region, and it remains in use to this day. During the Russian Civil War, Southern Siberia was heavily contested between the Red Army and the White Army. Although the Bolsheviks initially controlled most of Siberia's major population centers, this didn't last. White forces and the Czechoslovak Legion seized swathes of territory across Siberia and the Far East, with the Czechoslovaks controlling almost the entire Trans-Siberian Railway at one point. When the Allied Powers invaded Russia in support of White forces in 1918, they were mainly involved in fighting in Siberia. And the Japanese Empire continued to occupy parts of Siberia even after the other allies withdrew in 1920. Parts of the Far East were also briefly occupied by a Bolshevik satellite state, the Far Eastern Republic, to act as a buffer with Japan. After the Japanese withdrew, the remaining white forces in the Far East collapsed. The Red Army finally retook Vladivostok in 1922, and the last white Russian holdouts in the Far East surrendered the next year, ending the Civil War. Today, Siberia is part of the Russian Federation, under which the region is divided into dozens of federal subjects. Some are autonomous republics, like the Altai Republic and Sakha, while most of Siberia is organized under territories or regions. The largest of these divisions is the enormous Krasnoyarsk Krai, a territory larger than most countries, which sits roughly in the middle of Siberia. Siberia is also divided between three of Russia's federal districts, the Ural Federal District in the west, the Siberian Federal District in the center, and the Far Eastern Federal District in the east. Siberia has a total population of roughly 30 million people, which is minuscule for such an enormous territory. Roughly 70% of Siberia's populations live in the region's cities, which are mostly located in the south, along or close to the Trans-Siberian Railway, while the remaining 30% is spread thinly across the vast Siberian countryside. That 30% includes both rural settler communities and also many of Siberia's indigenous people, some of whom still follow their ancestral ways of life and practice traditional shamanism. The vast majority of Siberia's population actually consists of Russians, with Russians outnumbering all of Siberia's indigenous peoples combined. Siberia is extremely rich in many different kinds of natural resources, the extraction of which forms the backbone of its economy. Huge reserves of oil and natural gas in Siberia form the backbone of Russia's massive energy industry. And Siberia also has loads of virtually every kind of economically valuable metal. Siberia is home to some of the world's largest deposits of gold, silver, nickel, zinc, and lead, as well as coal and diamonds. Mining and the fossil fuel industry dominate the Siberian economy, although Siberia is also home to thriving logging and fishing industries. Thanks to the rich waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, Siberia brings in a full 10% of the world's annual fish catch, though the fishing industry has been in decline since the fall of the Soviet Union. During the Soviet period, particularly during the Cold War, Siberia became home to a number of closed cities. The existence of these cities was officially a secret, and access to them was heavily restricted. This is because most of these cities were involved in the development of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, or the space industry. Many of these closed cities still exist and are still classified in modern Russia, which has the most closed cities of any country in the world. Not all of them are located in Siberia, but the huge size and low population of the region make it an ideal place to hide settlements like this. Siberia's far northeast is home to one of the world's most ambitious and fascinating scientific experiments, Pleistocene Park, a project aiming to restore the ancient Mammoth steppe ecosystem. By reintroducing populations of herbivores analogous to the ones that roamed the steppe during the Ice Age, the project aims to convert barren tundra back into productive grassland. The goal of Pleistocene Park is actually focused on slowing climate change. The scientists running the project argue that converting tundra and taiga back into grassland and reintroducing large animal populations will make the Siberian permafrost more resilient, and that a grassland environment would be a better carbon sink than slow growing taiga, or less productive tundra. The project is still a work in progress, but it's already seen some promising results. In fact, grasslands have already been restored to much of the park. Siberia is a fascinating place with far more to it than most people give it credit for. It's not just barren tundra, it's a land of staggering natural beauty, deep history, and many unique cultures, with some of the largest ecosystems on earth. And I hope, with this video, you've come away with a better understanding of it. This is my book Badlands, the geography of cities that shouldn't exist and why they do. It's all about cities like Phoenix, Tokyo, and more which are geographically in a tough spot. Whether it's water scarcity, seismic activity, sinking land, or huge volcanoes, this is the deep dive you've always wanted about the places that feel like they shouldn't exist at all. So let's go get a geography book on the New York Times bestseller list and pre-order it today. There's a link in the description below, and of course, head over to my site thebyte.co for even more details. I hope you enjoyed learning about Siberia. If you did, be sure to check out this video about one of the weirdest bodies of water on the planet, the Sargasso Sea. Thanks for watching. See you next time.