All over the world, climate change is altering our world in ways that are both obvious and subtle. Some effects of global warming change rapidly, while others are slow-moving disasters.
But in northern Russia, where the permafrost zone is shrinking as a side effect of climate change, towns are watching helplessly as their buildings are being deformed and even destroyed by the moving ground. In Norilsk, a town of 177,000 known for its nickel production, about 60 percent of the buildings have been deformed, according to a local report earlier this year.
"We sat on the couch and could feel it tilt," Norilsk resident Nadezhda Scherbakov told the Guardian. She and her husband, Yury, were inside their home as the walls cracked and the floor began moving up on them.
The permafrost melt has forced more than 100 Norilsk homes to be abandoned, the Guardian also reported. It's the most polluted town in Russia, the report added, but despite the pollution and other issues, experts agree that the changing climate is as much to blame for the permafrost melt as anything else.
"In most cases, the effect of climate change was not accounted for properly or at all, so the story is not about one building falling, even though there are examples of that, but about thousands of people living in buildings which have the potential to fall," Dmitry Streletskiy, an assistant professor of geography at George Washington University, told the Guardian.
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