permafrost

A piece of the drilled permafrost core extracted during drilling operations on the New Siberian Islands in the North of eastern Siberia. Credit: Lutz Schirrmeister, Alfred Wegener Institute About a quarter of the organic carbon contained in ice-rich Arctic permafrost is more difficult for microorganisms to utilize. The reason for this is a strong binding of the organic material originating from dead plant remains to mineral…

Pipeline in Alaska (Alfred-Wegener-Institut / M. Langer). Credit: Alfred-Wegener-Institut / M. Langer Many of us picture the Arctic as largely untouched wilderness. But that has long-since ceased to be true for all of the continent. It is also home to oilfields and pipelines, mines and various other industrial activities. The corresponding facilities were built on a foundation once considered to be particularly stable and…

Mountaineers have visited Rifugio Casati, a four-story building 10,725 feet above sea level in the Italian Alps, for nearly a century. In 2016 Renato Alberti, who had overseen the structure for 35 years, noticed a vertical crack in one of the outer walls. Alberti, now age 67, filled the gap with repair foam, but the crack reopened after only a few days. Alberti thought something unusual must be happening. Perhaps the mountain was becoming unstable. His idea was met with skepticism by other people who were familiar with…

You may have heard: President Biden approved an enormous fossil fuel development in the Alaskan Arctic on Monday. The Willow Project,a planned $8 billion oil and gas extraction endeavor by ConocoPhillips, is set to move forward in the state’s North Slope—despite fierce pushback from climate and other environmental stakeholders.One nightmarish aspect of the Willow Project you might not have heard about is that ConocoPhillips plans to install “chillers” in the ground alongside its extractive infrastructure to manage…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Researchers from the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology (IGA) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have revealed the effects of environmental disturbances on the chemical stability of the peatland carbon pool in the northern Great Khingan Mountains currently and during the last millennium. …

Ice is melting at an alarming pace all over the world. Whether it’s on mountain peaks, at the poles, in the seas, or on the tundra, no place is immune. The melting ice is revealing fresh terrain, as well as exciting opportunities and hazards, such as valuable mineral deposits, ancient artifacts, and even unknown viruses. This situation calls for immediate attention, as we navigate the uncharted territory that lies beneath the melting ice.Across the planet, ice is rapidly disappearing. From mountain tops, the poles, the…

A brown bear that lay almost perfectly preserved in the frozen wilds of eastern Siberia for 3,500 years has undergone a necropsy by a team of scientists after it was discovered by reindeer herders on a desolate island in the Arctic."This find is absolutely unique: the complete carcass of an ancient brown bear," said Maxim Cheprasov, laboratory chief at the Lazarev Mammoth Museum Laboratory at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, eastern Siberia.The female bear was found by reindeer herders in 2020 jutting out…

Climate warming and permafrost thawing on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) have changed the distributive features of permafrost, which leads to alterations in soil moisture and permeability, and exerts profound impacts on groundwater flow regimes on the QTP. Recently, a joint research team from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Lanzhou Jiaotong University and Northeast Forestry…

ORNL scientists created a high-performance simulation of the Arctic tundra that found the process of soil subsidence due to permafrost thaw would be self-limited in the decades ahead. Credit: David Graham/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists set out to address one of the biggest uncertainties about how carbon-rich permafrost will respond to gradual sinking of the land surface as temperatures…

The picture shows the recovery of vegetation for the 2001 fire and 2010 fire over Tanana Flats lowland permafrost in interior Alaska where the study was conducted. Credit: Florida Atlantic University About 40 percent of interior Alaska is underlain by ice-rich permafrost—permanently frozen grounds made up of soil, gravel and sand—bound together by ice. Certain conditions, such as climate warming, have intensified tundra…