How the Soviet Union destroyed permafrost

See A Giant Crater in Siberia Is Belching Up Russia’s Past by Sophie Pinkham, a professor at Cornell. Excerpt:

"In the 20th, hungry for minerals and isolated from global trade networks, the Soviets searched desperately for resources to fuel their rapid industrial and technological expansion; diamonds, gold, silver, tungsten, nickel, tin, coal and, of course, oil and gas had to be wrested as quickly as possible from the vast eastern territories. The Soviets sent gulag prisoners to labor in permafrost country because that was where the treasure was buried. Prisoners died as they helped extract it from the earth — and many ended up in the ground themselves.

In 1937 a Moscow geologist discovered tin ore near the present-day town of Batagay. As the Soviets settled and mined the area, they cut down the forest that shielded the land from warming sunlight and held the earth in place. The permafrost survived previous warming cycles without melting, but this deforestation, it seems, pushed it over the edge. In his largely autobiographical collection of short stories, “Kolyma Tales,” Varlam Shalamov, a former gulag prisoner, described a mass grave that had burst out of the stony ground. “The earth opened,” he wrote, “baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies.” The permafrost can keep secrets, but it can also testify to crimes."