permafrost

She’s over 30,000 years old, and yet her preservation is astounding: She has her skin, her tiny tusk nubs, her toenails, and her little tail. She still has tufts of fur, and her trunk—with its prehensile tip—is complete and malleable. Looking at the initial photograph from where she was found at a Yukon gold mine, she looks like she only recently met her demise.Her name is Nun cho ga, a name decided upon by Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Elders.“‘Nun go’ is ‘baby,’” Debbie Nagano, heritage director of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government…

Ice wedges (Yedoma) on the Bol'shoy Lyakhovsky, the most southern Island of the New Siberian Archipelago. Credit: Alfred Wegener Institute / G. Schwamborn A new publication and interactive map summarize the current state of knowledge on the risks posed by permafrost soils—and call for decisive action …

A data collection station sits at the Kuzitrin River ground temperature monitoring site on the Seward Peninsula, one of several sites in the Geophysical Institute Permafrost Laboratory's monitoring network. Scientists have observed talik development at the site. Credit: Vladimir Romanovsky More areas of year-round unfrozen ground have begun dotting Interior and Northwest Alaska and will continue to increase in extent due to…

The Siberian tundra could disappear by the year 2500, unless greenhouse gas emissions are dramatically reduced. Even in the best-case scenarios, two-thirds of this landscape – defined by its short growing season and cover of grasses, moss, shrubs and lichens – could vanish, leaving behind two fragments separated by 1,553 miles (2,500 kilometers), scientists recently predicted.  And as the tundra's permafrost cover melts away, it could release vast quantities of stored greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, potentially…

Throughout our planet's history, Earth has fluctuated between a hothouse and an icehouse.Today, our home is supposed to be in a period of global cooling, but human emissions of greenhouse gasses are reversing that natural trend at a rapid and unprecedented rate.  One of the last times Earth went from an icehouse to a hothouse this quickly and dramatically, about 304 million years ago, our planet experienced major upheaval.During the Kasimovian–Gzhelian boundary (KGB), atmospheric carbon levels doubled in roughly 300,000…

There are water molecules and ice up on the Moon, so how did they get there? Asteroid and comet collisions are likely to have produced some of it, but a new study suggests another source of lunar water: the Earth's atmosphere.  Hydrogen and oxygen ions escaping from our planet's upper atmosphere and then combining on the Moon could have created as much as 3,500 cubic kilometers (840 cubic miles) of surface permafrost or subsurface liquid water, scientists say.The thinking is that hydrogen and oxygen ions are driven into…