Permafrost will be with us for a long time. However, any active degradation of permafrost will have impacts on the environment.
Alaska oil development on the North Slope is caught up in an ironic conundrum. Alaska has permafrost, a permanently frozen layer at variable depth below the surface in frigid regions of a planet. As Earth warms permafrost thaws. The burning of fossil fuels (oil) is heating the planet and thawing the permafrost below oil wells […]
“The closer to the ocean, it seems like, the stronger the warming signal in the Arctic right now,” Vladimir Romanovsky told Frontier Scientists, and a warming Arctic leads to warming permafrost. Romanovsky, professor of Geophysics, heads the Permafrost Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Alaska is edged by oceans on three sides. […]
Metal caps protect deep holes drilled in Alaskan permafrost ground from wanderers of the human and bear varieties. Permafrost, found across the Arctic, is subsurface soil which has remained frozen for two years or more. Permafrost temperatures in Alaska are rapidly changing. Vladimir Romanovsky, professor of Geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and head […]
“All you have to do is fly over the Arctic to see the tracks of vehicles. And it’s a long lasting effect: there’s tracks from vehicles that were driven out 50 years ago. It doesn’t recover very quickly. In that sense it’s pretty fragile.” Permafrost has been called permanently frozen soil. William Cable, research professional […]
When botanist Janet Jorgenson first visited a patch of tundra east of Kaktovik in 1988, it was flat, dry and thick with 29 species of lichens and mosses. Now, Tapkaurak is wet, gullied and fragrant with sedges and grasses. And, like other parts of Alaska’s North Slope, it is a few feet farther from the […]
Permafrost, subsurface soil that remains frozen throughout the year, can be found on Alaska’s North Slope and in places across the Arctic. “The temperature of permafrost is rapidly changing,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, Geophysics professor and head of the Permafrost Laboratory at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. In the very near past when Vladimir […]
In 1973, Elden Johnson was a young engineer with a job working on one of the most ambitious and uncertain projects in the world — an 800-mile steel pipeline that carried warm oil over frozen ground. Thirty-five years later, Johnson looked back at what he called “the greatest story ever told of man’s interaction with […]
May 20 2015, 9pm in Alaska, tune in to KAKM Science Wednesdays, Alaska Public Media, for Frontier Scientists’ CHANGING PERMAFROST. Under the tundra thawing Permafrost forms thermokarst features, causing sinkholes and landslides. Shifting climate conditions release greenhouse gases locked beneath the tundra in previously frozen ground. The episode features University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute […]
Ned Rozell for UAFGI – Kenji Yoshikawa will soon sleep on brilliant, blue-white landscape that has never felt the imprint of his boots. Beginning on spring equinox, the permafrost scientist and a partner will attempt to drive snowmachines from Prudhoe Bay to Canada’s Baffin Island. While traveling a distance equal to Seattle to Tokyo to […]
Carbon is the building block of life. Our knowledge of current climate change, however, has us counting how much carbon enters the atmosphere. We burn fossil fuels, adding anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon dioxide to the air. Meanwhile, natural processes also add carbon to the air. We know that methane can arise from warming lakes and oceans. Methane traps […]
Marie Gilbert for UAF Cornerstone – As the Arctic warms, greenhouse gases will be released from thawing permafrost faster and at significantly higher levels than previous estimates, according to survey results from 41 international scientists published in the Nov. 30 issue of the journal Nature. Permafrost thaw will release approximately the same amount of carbon […]
Ned Rozell for UAFGI – In northern Alaska, an amphitheater of frozen ground is thawing where a northern river is cutting it, exposing walls of ice. The feature, known by scientists as “yedoma,” is the largest of its kind yet found in Alaska. Jim Helmericks, who lives with his wife Teena on the mouth of the […]
January 31, 2012– Permafrost is an underground phenomena but three new videos, with beautiful footage and photos, allow you to see permafrost with your own eyes. University of Alaska-Fairbanks scientists Vladimir Romanovsky, Sergey Marchenko, and Ronald Daanen describe permafrost in videos “It’s a Bore Hole”, “The Permafrost Tilted House” and “Permafrost Patterns”. We should get […]
The permafrost monitoring network in the polar regions of the Northern Hemisphere was enhanced during the International Polar Year (IPY), and new information on permafrost thermal state was collected for regions where there was little available. This augmented monitoring network is an important legacy of the IPY, as is the updated baseline of current permafrost […]