From Siberia, an Unlikely Cry: ‘We Need Greenpeace Out Here!’

TAS-YURYAKH, Russia — At a truck stop at the northern terminus of the Vilyui ice highway in northeastern Siberia, drivers make small talk not about life on the road but rather the life of the road.

It might last another week, suggested one driver casually, tucking into a steaming plate of meatballs.

“Not likely,” countered Maxim A. Andreyevsky, 31, the driver of a crude oil tanker truck. “Didn’t you see the shimmer on the surface? It will be gone in a day or two.”

Every spring, thousands of miles of so-called winter highway in Russia, mostly serving oil and mining towns in Siberia and far northern European Russia, melt back into the swamps from which they were conjured the previous fall. And every year, it seems to the men whose livelihoods depend upon it, the road of ice melts earlier.

That insight has turned Tas-Yuryakh, a tiny village of log cabins that depends on the ice highway for business at its truck stop and gas station — the last gas for 508 miles — into a hotbed of true believers in the human contribution to climate change.

“Of course people are to blame,” Andreyevsky said. “They pump so much gas, they pump so much oil. Brother, we need Greenpeace out here.”

With highways made of ice, including the icy surfaces of deep lakes and rivers, all it takes is one pleasantly warm spring day for the highway to vanish. Every year, officials say, at least one big rig goes through the ice of a lake or big river.

“The danger is always with the daring truck drivers,” said Aleksandr A. Kondratiev, the director of the regional department of roads in Mirny, a diamond-mining town in northeastern Siberia linked to the rest of Russia to the south only by the Vilyui ice road. Most of the time, he said, they escape with their lives.

When the Vilyui ice highway first opened in 1976, its builders celebrated the occasion on Revolution Day, Nov. 7, Kondratyev said. These days, the road rarely opens before mid-December, he said, and it now typically closes April 1, about a month earlier than it used to.

For truck drivers in this part of Siberia, The Plate, the truck stop that marks the Vilyui highway’s northern end, is an island of comfort in a sea of snow.

Drivers stepped in, kicked snow off their boots and lined up at a counter to order their last restaurant meal for three days, the typical time it takes to drive over the ice to the next gravel road. Outside, a skinny, angry Siberian husky tied to a tree barked fiercely at anybody who came near.

Ice highways are integral to Russia’s mining and oil economy in the Far North, as they are in Canada and Alaska, where ice roads are also freezing later and melting earlier.

The highways are surfaced with ice either graded by a bulldozer from frozen swamp or formed by spraying river water onto the intended site of the road and allowing it to freeze.

The winter roads take shortcuts across frozen lakes and rivers but mostly traverse permafrost, the layer of frozen, prehistoric swamp that when melted resembles frozen spinach after a spell in the microwave. Permafrost is mostly comprised of mud and vegetation but includes the occasional frozen mammoth. It is typically hundreds of yards deep, and in places in Siberia penetrates nearly a mile into the earth, rendering it impossible to dig down to bedrock to build a road.

At the top is what is known as the active layer, or the upper 5 to 10 feet that thaws and refreezes every year. In the fall, this layer becomes construction material for Russia’s ice road builders.

The first crews arrive in a “light column” of bulldozers traveling on the still boggy ground to plow insulating snow from the future road, exposing the soil to cold air and hastening a deep freeze. A bulldozer makes a final pass to smooth it off and the road is done — until the first warm spring day.

This road is in fact a 508-mile long ice rink, hard and slippery under a coating of blown snow, connecting the Yakutsk and Irkutsk regions of Siberia. When the road melts, The Plate truck stop shutters for the summer.

Late in the season, Siberian trucking companies raise fees for drivers to compensate for the danger and difficulty of driving during the spring thaw. Ice trucking is in any case handsomely compensated, by Russian standards.

In the dead of winter, drivers at The Plate said, shipping companies pay about $500 for a one-way run over the Vilyui highway. After mid-April, the rate goes above $700.

But it’s hard work. The wife of one truck driver on the Vilyui highway wrote a book about his life with the title, “Territory of Risk.”

When a truck breaks the ice on a river crossing, “you don’t hear anything,” in the cab over the thrum of the motor, said Aleksandr G. Potashov, nursing a cup of tea at The Plate before setting off. “You just feel the truck collapsing in.” On an ice road river crossing, drivers say, seat belts must be unfastened, to make a quick escape in the event of a breakthrough.

Another hazard is melt water pooling on the icy road surface, rendering it too slippery to ascend grades and reflecting light in the shimmer that Andreyevsky said he had noticed on the road.

Out on an ice road, a warm spring day is a curse. Polishing off their meals, drivers recalled melts of years past. In 1996, an unexpectedly warm spring stranded dozens of truckers along hundreds of miles of the Vilyui highway.

In these cases, the trucks and their cargo stay put until the next winter. Drivers fell trees and build platforms of logs for the trucks, lest the vehicles sink forever.

Ruslan A. Sizonov, a director of logistics at the Alrosa mining company, said the warming winters were shrinking the window for hauling in heavy equipment and fuel, even as the cost of the road remained the same. Russia’s federal government contracts with the mining company to build the road, at an annual cost of about $3,050 per mile at the current exchange rate.

The Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of Earth, scientists say. Last month, the maximum extent of Arctic Ocean ice cover was the second lowest since satellite record keeping began in the 1970s.

Russian energy companies are, though, seeing an upside to the thaw. Last year, a Russian-operated liquefied natural gas tanker, the Christophe de Margerie, made its maiden voyage carrying fuel to Asia over the thawing Arctic Ocean, which is opening as a new shipping route to the east. This year, Andreyevsky set off in his Renault truck on March 29, two days before the official closure of the road on April 1. While a few warm days came earlier in March, on that day the temperature was a safe minus-10 degrees Fahrenheit.

The plan was to make it to the graveled surface in the south before the melt.

If he makes it out with his crude oil load, Andreyevsky joked, he would only be adding to the road’s woes.

“Of course there is an effect,” on the climate from burning oil, he said. “The exhaust pipes are smoking.”