Franken-Petersburg -- When the Arctic Plague Returns

One of our earlier "Frankencities" scenarios suddenly looks uncomfortably relevant

There are moments when a work of speculative environmental fiction stops looking quite so speculative.

About ten years ago, as part of the Frankencities project, we imagined a future St Petersburg transformed by a combination of climate change, thawing permafrost, unstable ground and the return of diseases that had once been locked away in the frozen Arctic.

We called the scenario Franken-Petersburg.

Now, in October 2026, Russia has found itself at the centre of an unsettling real-world public-health mystery.

A 28-year-old worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute in Siberia has died following severe pneumonia of undetermined origin. The circumstances have prompted quarantine and medical monitoring of roughly 200 contacts. Russian authorities have said that no plague has been detected among those contacts, while the World Health Organization has asked for further information about the laboratory investigation and the precise cause of death. Reports of a laboratory accident involving plague bacteria remain -- as yet -- unconfirmed.

So this is not a story about a plague pandemic. Not yet, at least.

But it is an extraordinary reminder of one of the ideas behind Frankencities: the future can sometimes make yesterday's nightmares look remarkably prescient.

The Arctic is no longer securely frozen

Our original Franken-Petersburg scenario was based upon a simple environmental chain reaction.

As the climate warms, northern permafrost thaws.

As the frozen ground thaws, the physical landscape becomes unstable. Roads, buildings and underground structures are threatened. Watercourses change. Sinkholes appear. But something else can emerge from thawing ground: the biological past.

For centuries, perhaps millennia, frozen soils have preserved animal carcasses, burial sites and microorganisms. When that frozen archive is opened by rising temperatures, organisms that have been dormant for decades or centuries can potentially re-enter contemporary ecological systems.

This isn't merely science fiction.

In 2016, an anthrax outbreak on Russia's Yamal Peninsula was associated with unusually warm conditions and accelerated permafrost thaw. Thousands of reindeer died and dozens of people were affected. Scientific studies subsequently linked the outbreak to the possible exposure of viable Bacillus anthracis spores preserved in frozen soils and animal remains. Indeed, research has subsequently shown that permafrost thaw can create conditions favourable to the re-emergence of anthrax from previously contaminated environments.

So when Frankencities imagined an "Arctic Plague" emerging from thawing Russian permafrost, we were not inventing the underlying environmental mechanism from nothing.

The mechanism was already visible. What we did was turn that scientific warning into a story about a city.

Franken-Petersburg

In our imagined future, St Petersburg has already begun to suffer from the consequences of a warming northern climate. The city's immediate enemy is the ground beneath it.

As permafrost and seasonally frozen soils become increasingly unstable across northern Russia, underground watercourses shift and frozen soils lose their structural integrity. In our scenario, this produces enormous sinkholes capable of swallowing fields, vehicles and even entire blocks.

But the sinkholes are only the beginning. The thaw also begins to open an ancient biological archive.

Animal carcasses emerge. Old burial grounds are disturbed. Microbial material preserved in frozen soils is exposed. And eventually an old disease returns.

We imagined an Arctic Plague sweeping southwards towards St Petersburg, transforming what had once seemed like an environmental problem into an urban public-health catastrophe. The image accompanying this story shows that future city: St Petersburg looming across a wet, unstable landscape, while an abandoned boat lies stranded in the foreground.

The picture was intended as a piece of speculative environmental art. But the underlying question was serious:

What happens when climate change begins to disturb not only the physical infrastructure of a city, but also its biological past?

And then came Irkutsk

The extraordinary thing about the present situation is that the geography has changed but the underlying relationship between Russia, disease, climate, science and technological risk has not. Our imagined disaster occurs in St Petersburg, near the western edge of Russia. The present incident is unfolding much farther east, in Irkutsk, Siberia, at an institution specifically devoted to researching plague and other dangerous pathogens.

Our fictional scenario involves a disease emerging from a thawing Arctic environment. The present case involves a scientist working inside a highly specialised infectious-disease laboratory. Our imagined pathogen is anthrax, which we called -- following Russian parlance -- the "Arctic Plague."

The pathogen at the centre of the present concern is Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for plague. And this difference is crucial. There is no evidence that an Arctic permafrost thaw caused the Irkutsk case, nor has a laboratory release of plague been established. Russian authorities say investigations have found no evidence of such an accident, while international health authorities are seeking more information.

Nevertheless, the similarities are unsettling. Both scenarios involve northern Russia. Both involve dangerous pathogens. Both involve the possibility of diseases moving from environments of containment into wider human society. Both raise questions about the relationship between scientific laboratories and the organisms they study. And both remind us that the boundary between the natural world and the technological world is becoming increasingly complicated.

The real Frankenstein problem

This is where Mary Shelley's Frankenstein becomes more than a literary decoration. The monster in Shelley's novel is not simply a frightening creature. He is a product of an experiment. Victor Frankenstein creates something he believes he can control — and then discovers that creation has consequences he did not anticipate. That is the fundamental metaphor behind Frankencities.

Modern cities are themselves gigantic experiments:

We manipulate rivers.

We drain wetlands.

We build underground infrastructure.

We store dangerous chemicals.

We construct laboratories for studying deadly pathogens.

We move animals and people around the planet.

We drill into frozen ground.

We extract resources from increasingly fragile environments.

And we assume that the systems we have created will remain under our control.

But occasionally they don't.

The frozen past is becoming part of the future

Perhaps the most disturbing lesson of the Arctic is that climate change does not merely create new environmental problems. It can also reactivate old ones. The permafrost is effectively an enormous archive. For thousands of years it has preserved organic material in frozen conditions.

As that archive thaws, some things disappear harmlessly. Others become sources of greenhouse gases. Others destabilise the ground. And some may contain microorganisms capable of interacting with contemporary ecosystems. The 2016 Yamal anthrax outbreak demonstrated that this isn't simply a hypothetical possibility. Research has found that unusually high temperatures contributed to permafrost thaw in the region and helped create conditions in which previously frozen anthrax spores could become exposed. That is why our old Franken-Petersburg scenario now deserves another look.

We were not predicting that a particular Russian laboratory worker would die in 2026. We were exploring a broader environmental possibility:

What happens when climate change opens the biological archives of the Arctic?

That question has become more urgent, not less.

A warning, not a prophecy

It would be irresponsible to claim that Frankencities predicted the present Irkutsk incident.

It didn't. The current cause of death remains uncertain. There is no confirmed plague outbreak, no confirmed laboratory release and no evidence at present of sustained human-to-human transmission. The ECDC has likewise said that, based on the information available, there are no reports of secondary cases indicating sustained transmission. But there is another sense in which speculative futures can be said to "predict" events. They don't necessarily predict what will happen. They predict what kinds of things we should be watching for. That was always the purpose of Frankencities.

Our St Petersburg image was not intended as a literal prediction. It was a warning about interacting systems:

warming climate → thawing permafrost → unstable landscapes → exposed biological material → new ecological risks → vulnerable cities.

The Irkutsk incident presents a different pathway:

dangerous pathogen → scientific laboratory → possible exposure → unexplained illness → quarantine → international concern.

The pathways are different. But they converge on the same uncomfortable question:

How much control do we really have over the monsters we create, awaken or uncover?

That is the question Mary Shelley asked two centuries ago.

It is still the question confronting the world's cities today. And somewhere beneath the frozen ground of the Arctic, there may be many more stories waiting to thaw.