There are millions of tusks out in the tundra. Many of them are buried very deep in the ice, but some are near the surface, and that’s where local hunters are finding them. So Abrugaeva and writer Brook Larmer traveled to remote Yakutia, Russia, for published in the April issue of National Geographic Magazine.

Larmer says that 90 percent of mammoth tusks end up in China, where they are often turned into mammoth trinkets. But the bigger tusks can be carved by master carvers in southern China and turned into art that can be worth $1 million or $1.5 million.

But the tusks aren’t as plentiful as you might imagine. “[Tusk hunters] can go a whole summer and find only a couple hundred pounds worth of tusk, but those tusks are so valuable,” Larmer says. The tusk seen in the image below? Larmer says it’s “probably the finest specimen that was found last year. And that can be worth $80,000 to $100,000 or even more,” when the hunters sell them in Yakutia.