Pleistocene Park - and a tank?

I got a real belly laugh out of this true-life account of tundra scientist Sergei Zimov of the Russian Academy of Science station at Cherskii. It ranges over wooly mammoths, permafrost carbon stores, and ... a tank? Yes, indeed. Read for yourself:

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2008/sepoct/features/siberia.html

Here's another page about Zimov that casually mentioned the tank in the station's list of equiment, and got me curious, leading to the Stanford magazine article above...

http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/globalvoices/05essay.dtl

Here's the closest thing to a homepage for Zimov's project that I've found:

http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/fffsc/station.html

You just can't make this kind of stuff up. Truth really is stranger than fiction.