A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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yedoma
Yedoma is a kind of permafrost found across Siberia, Alaska, and the Yukon: fine windblown silt laid down through the last ice age with enormous wedges of ice running through it, so that the deposit can be more than half ice by volume. It reaches over a hundred feet thick, is tens of thousands of years old, and holds the frozen remains of the mammoth-steppe fauna in extraordinary condition.
Etymology
The word is Russian and comes from the language of the Siberian north, where it names this ground specifically. Russian permafrost science developed a large and precise vocabulary well before the English-speaking world had much reason to, and English has borrowed from it repeatedly, taking naled, polynya, sastrugi, and shuga the same way.
Notes
Nearly everything known about the mammoth steppe comes out of yedoma. Frozen mammoth, steppe bison, cave lion, and horse have come out of these bluffs with hair, gut contents, and soft tissue intact, along with seeds and pollen that reconstruct the vegetation they were eating. The ice wedges form as the ground contracts and cracks in extreme cold and meltwater fills the crack and freezes, repeating for millennia.