Alva Review-Courier -

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) — A dozen bison from a ranch near Delta Junction are being sent to Russia in an attempt to recreate an ice age ecosystem in eastern Siberia.

Haines filmmaker Luke Griswold-Tergis has been coordinating the bison shipment for the geoengineering project called Pleistocene Park, the Daily News-Miner reported . The project is an experiment to determine whether the re-introduction of large herbivores can slow the acceleration of global warming caused by permafrost melt.

The bison are set to be transported to the park next Monday.

Griswold-Tergis is producing a documentary on the 8-square-mile (21-square-kilometer) fenced enclosure near an Arctic research center.

Wild horses, yaks, reindeer, musk oxen and a lone male European bison already roam Pleistocene Park, which was founded in 1996.

The 12 bison from Alaska will be the first American plains bison in the park. Bison are an important part of the project because they had the largest biomass of all the large animals of Siberia during the last Ice Age.

Griswold-Tergis helped connect the park with the Stevens Village Bison Farm, owned by the tribal government of the Yukon River community of Stevens Village.

Griswold-Tergis said he chose the farm because it had the facilities to load the bison into pens, which is not an easy undertaking. At 11 months old, bison already weigh about 500 pounds (227 kilograms).

The theory behind the Pleistocene Park project is that the return of large herd animals will reduce global warming by promoting the development of grasslands, which both reflect sunlight better than forests and brushlands and are also better at sequestering carbon-dioxide out of the atmosphere over long periods.

Additionally, large herds of animals, such as bison, tramp down snow, decreasing its insulating value and helping cold air penetrate the ground to keep permafrost frozen.

The greenhouse gas reductions of re-introducing these large herbivores to the Arctic more than make up for the methane gas they would produce by their digestion, park director Nikita Zimov said.

The park is a proof of concept idea that would need to be duplicated on a larger scale to affect climate on a meaningful level.

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Information from: Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner, http://www.newsminer.com