🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE Melting permafrost in the Arctic is unearthing diseases and destroying landscapes.
Erosion along the Arctic coast in Alaska’s Teshekpuk Lake Special Area lays bare pale permafrost just beneath the ground’s surface. Caused by the disappearance of sea ice, the rapid erosion is one of several problems in the area caused by climate change. Homes are sinking and trees are tipping over in Alaska. Mammoth bones are surfacing in the Russian Far East — so many that people have begun selling the tusks as a substitute for elephant ivory.
And the worst is yet to come. Organic matter trapped in permafrost — everything from mammoth carcasses to ancient fruit — contains massive stores of carbon, an estimated 1,500 billion tons, or nearly twice the carbon currently in the atmosphere. As the ground warms, the long-frozen material will decay and release the carbon as greenhouse gases.
, herby white tundra flowers, from 30,000-year-old fruits. The specimens were recovered from ancient squirrel burrows, 125 feet deep in the permafrost of northeast Russia, according to the study published in. After sprouting in nutrient-rich test tubes, the seedlings had run-of-the-mill plant lives: They grew into fruit-bearing flowers in plastic pots and soil, resuming normal biological activity after being frozen for 300 centuries.
Through these experiments, researchers can directly study how viruses and life-forms evolved over time. “I think we can really try to understand better the origin of life,” says Claverie. “Permafrost is important because we can go deeper and find ancestors of those viruses.” Currently, his team is preparing to analyze samples taken from more than 500 feet deep in the permafrost, dated to about 600,000 years ago.
However, Claverie believes there is low risk of a global pandemic from these diseases in permafrost. “If it’s an old known disease like smallpox, it will be sad for the poor people who get it, but it could be OK because it could be recognized quite easily, and you put the people in quarantine.” Ancient footwear emerged from thawing permafrost in remarkable shape at northwestern Alaska’s Birnirk archaeological site, which is more than 700 years old.
A researcher drills a borehole 240 feet deep into the Greenland Ice Sheet to insert sensors that will monitor temperatures around the subsurface of Camp Century. Last summer, climatologist William Colgan, a researcher for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, led an expedition of scientists to Camp Century, an abandoned U.S. military base buried in the Greenland Ice Sheet.
But the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting, and faster than once projected. From 2007 to 2011, the ice sheet shrunk by about 290 billion tons per year. Compare that with an average loss of 83 billion tons per year from 1900 to 1983. The scientists couldn’t physically enter Camp Century because decades of snow and ice accumulation have sealed the entrance. “It doesn’t look like there’s any air space left in the tunnel network, so even if we were to dig down to 30 meters to one of the access points, it looks like all the tunnels are just crushed completely shut,” Colgan says.
Seen in the gloom of a November day in Siberia, Norilsk is Russia’s northernmost city, and its most polluted. Thawing permafrost is causing hundreds of buildings there to crack and destabilize. Modern human settlements are also in peril. Permafrost includes ice that is both pervasive — binding soil components together like glue — and concentrated in thick, pure chunks. When gluelike ice melts, the soil becomes mud, causing gradual sinking and erosion.
Twentieth-century engineers calculated how much weight foundations could support based on ground temperatures — but those temps have risen by up to 3.6 degrees across Russian permafrost zones in the past three decades. “Those designs were not accounting for such a fast pace of climate change,” says Streletskiy.
While Arctic urbanites grapple with collapsing buildings, traditional coastal villages face total destruction. Over the past five decades, shorelines throughout the Arctic have receded by an average of 1.5 feet annually. Some spots have lost as much as 70 feet in mere hours during violent storms. These Arctic coasts are disappearing due to the combined effects of permafrost thaw, sea level rise and longer summers when the seas are ice-free.
“The fact that they have appeared and weren’t really predicted tells me that there are probably surprises out there that we don’t know about yet, that I’m sure we’ll be seeing soon,” says Ted Schuur, a permafrost researcher at Northern Arizona University.
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