Mammoth Ivory Fed Chinese Demand

After the 1990 international ban on trading elephant ivory, China increasingly turned to legal mammoth ivory recovered from thawing permafrost in the Russian Arctic. In 2013, National Geographic reported that nearly 90 percent of Siberian mammoth tusks, estimated at more than 60 tons annually, ended up in China. Rising temperatures and erosion exposed more tusks, encouraging hundreds or thousands of hunters to search the Siberian tundra and Arctic islands. However, legal mammoth ivory failed to reduce demand for illegal elephant ivory, and both materials often reached the same Chinese carving workshops.

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