In summer 2019, the physicist Gareth Rees flew into Yakutsk to meet a team of Russian scientists. The far eastern Siberian port is known as the coldest city on Earth, but that year it was simmering under a heatwave. Together the researchers drove deep into the region’s sprawling forests on a road paved by gulag prisoners.
The British and Russian scientists were on a mission to study how the boreal forests of the subarctic region are transforming with climate change. Together they measured 2,000 trees, sweating under the heavy clothes protecting them from crowds of insects.
Rees had worked with Moscow State University on the issue since the fall of the iron curtain. A specialist in remote sensing, or detecting ecological changes by measuring radiation, he was involved in science diplomacy and was in Moscow with the UK Foreign Office as recently as January to support joint research.