When I was a young soils engineer, and single, I daydreamed about moving to Alaska to study permafrost, a soil state which defies conventional analysis and is susceptible of dramatic elastic and plastic deformation under load. Reason got the upper hand when I realized that if I became an expert on permafrost, which still fascinates me as an engineering material, I’d have to spend the rest of my life where there is permafrost.
This, I should add, was before I knew about the existence of Sarah Palin, so YAY! for thinking ahead.
Here’s something I didn’t foresee: The permafrost is … melting.
Beneath Wetzen’s house, and in great swaths of land across much of Alaska’s vast central and northern interior, the past decade of too-warm winters has unlocked organic material that’s been trapped in icy ground for some 30,000 years. That ground is made of permafrost: many yards of mammoth bones, grasses, soil and other detritus frozen when this land was steppe tundra, ice-cold all year round. Now that permafrost is thawing. The land, losing its ice content, is receding. Spindly black spruce trees, the telltale arboreal species of permafrost area, are pitched at odd, drunken angles in places where the thawing ground beneath them has sunken or heaved. The meltwater from that ice is welling up, forming small lakes that gradually become bigger as they melt the permafrost beneath them. A significant portion of the lake behind Wetzen’s house was a forest 50 years ago. The two-lane highway in front undulates abruptly in places where ice wedges underground have thawed.
[ … ]
None of the permafrost thawing beneath millions of lakes across the Arctic is accounted for in global predictions about climate change — it’s “a gap in our climate modeling,” says Katey Walter Anthony, a University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher who studies permafrost thaw across Alaska and Siberia. She’s become famous in certain circles for finding methane bubbling up beneath the ice in frozen-over permafrost lakes, cutting a hole ice-fishing style and lighting the highly flammable gas on fire, sending up a column of flames 10 feet high.