No matter where you are in the world, you’ve likely noticed the weather growing more extreme in recent years, with hotter summers and colder winters.
And chances are, if you’re reading this, you’d pin it largely on the climate crisis.
So it might surprise you that the Earth is actually warming fastest in its polar regions, where temperatures are rising nearly four times faster than the global average. As a result, the Arctic Ocean is no longer as cold as it used to be.
According to NASA, Arctic sea ice hit a near-historic low last summer. This poses a serious threat to the ocean currents that help keep the global climate stable.
But beneath the ice surface lies another cause for concern. Permafrost is ground that has remained frozen for at least two years, but often much longer. In fact, the world’s oldest known permafrost has been continuously frozen for over 700,000 years.
As the Arctic warms, permafrost is thawing – releasing greenhouse gases from ancient plants and animals that have been trapped under the ice without having decayed.
Not only is this making the planet hotter, but research shows it could even bring back old diseases that have laid dormant for centuries.
These shifting landscapes are impacting local communities, too: across the Arctic, permafrost melt is causing damage to infrastructure and disrupting access to clean water and food. More worryingly, the ground is melting faster than ever.
But if you think thawing permafrost is a distant problem, it’s not – it affects us all. Here’s why.
Permafrost is composed of soil, gravel and sand formed by ice, whose thickness can range from one meter to more than 1,500 meters. When the ambient temperature rises above freezing, the active layer thaws, which can happen annually.
This frozen ground can extend several hundred meters deep, and much of the world’s permafrost has remained intact for centuries or even millennia. In some regions, it’s covered by a layer of peat that helps prevent it from melting.
Permafrost is mostly found in the northern hemisphere, where it covers about a quarter of the exposed land surface, and stretches across high-elevation regions of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia. It’s also found in mountainous areas of the southern hemisphere, particularly in Antarctica.
What makes permafrost especially fascinating is that it holds organic material that’s been frozen since the last ice age – over 10,000 years ago.
In other words, it serves as nature’s freezer, storing carbon safely underground for thousands of years as the frozen soil slows or even prevents decomposition.
Unfortunately, when permafrost thaws, it releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases from this ancient organic matter into today’s atmosphere.
According to a UN report published in 2008, thawing permafrost is a ‘wildcard’ that could release vast amounts of methane, leading to further warming that causes permafrost to melt even faster in a dangerous feedback loop.
The same applies to carbon dioxide, as the Arctic could soon turn from a carbon sink into a carbon source.
In fact, a recent study found that permafrost in the northern hemisphere is likely already contributing to global heating over a 20-year period.
Luis Andrés Yarzábal, a molecular biologist and professor at the Universidad Católica de Cuenca in Ecuador, draws from his research on the connections between melting permafrost and microbes.
“We thought for many years that glaciers and permafrost were devoid of life,” he said, “but we found approximately 100 million microbes per milliliter of melted permafrost, which is a huge amount of microorganisms.”
Yarzábal pointed out that a vast amount of tiny microbes waking up from these ‘frozen prisons’ are causing ancient organic matter to rapidly break down.
His team found that while many microorganisms were already dead, a significant number were still viable.
“Their cells weren’t active or reproducing, but once conditions become favorable, like when temperatures rise, they start multiplying,” he explains.
As the planet gets hotter, microbes that have been ‘sleeping’ in the permafrost could start to wake up.
That happened in Siberia in 2016, where microbes from reindeer that had died over 70 years earlier caused an anthrax outbreak when the frozen ground melted. But melting permafrost could also expose us to much older microorganisms, including those that became extinct millions of years ago.
Yarzábal’s research involves isolating wild microorganisms, many of which are unknown to science. Some may be at risk of extinction, while others are now reactivating.
His team is searching for microbes that act as antagonists to others – meaning they could potentially spread diseases and cause large-scale damage to ecosystems.
So, should we be worried about a pandemic caused by melting permafrost? Yarzábal isn’t.
“The existence of pathogens in ice or permafrost does not necessarily mean that we will face an epidemic event or a pandemic,” he says.
Still, these concerns are understandable, Yarzábal concedes, especially with eco-anxiety on the rise and the experience of COVID-19 still fresh in our memories.
He believes that scientists themselves sometimes add to the unease by coining terms like ‘zombie virus,’ ‘zombie microbes,’ and ‘superbugs,’ and using words like ‘resurrection’ and ‘de-extinction.’
A prime example is the supposed revival of the dire wolf, which is actually just a genetically edited gray wolf.
While buzzwords can help raise public awareness around serious issues like thawing permafrost, Yarzábal emphasizes that scientists should be “very careful” in how they frame their work.
“We must not panic, but we also have to improve our knowledge about this possibility.”
Disease outbreaks can be scary, but just as troubling are the physical changes already happening, affecting up to 3 million people.
“Permafrost is a very different creature depending on where you are,” says Susanna Gartler, a social and cultural anthropologist at the University of Vienna.
Gartler led a recent study that identified five key hazards posed by melting permafrost to local populations in the Arctic region: infrastructure failure, the disruption of mobility and supplies, degraded water quality, risks to food security, and exposure to diseases and contaminants.
All across the Arctic, permafrost is sinking – a process known as thaw subsidence. In some areas, it’s sinking by as much as 3 centimeters annually, often causing damage to buildings, roads and other infrastructure.
What’s more, as permafrost thaws, large, deep holes, known as slumps, form in the landscape, making the ground uneven and disrupting travel and transport.
This is particularly problematic for local communities that typically depend on hunting, foraging and ice fishing for their livelihoods. “You sink in every step you take,” says Gartler.
Beyond these physical effects, the changing Arctic landscape is also affecting social and cultural life in local communities.
“These activities are tied to the core of the cultural understanding and identity of these Indigenous Peoples,” Gartler explains.
“They have relationships not just with each other but also with rivers, mountains, plants and animals. When these are affected, the people are impacted on a deeper level as well.”
These effects are in turn taking a psychological toll on local residents. “It’s not just this thing far away that will eventually impact the climate – it’s their ancestral home that’s getting lost,” says Gartler.
“They have to live with those emotions every day.”
Two-thirds of Arctic sea ice has vanished since 1958, and glaciers around the world are melting at a rate of 267 billion tonnes per year as a result of the climate crisis. Can we still stop permafrost from suffering the same fate?
Yarzábal believes one thing that we can do is to continue studying it.
“Scientific knowledge is very important even if we do not see any application right now, as this knowledge can be very important in the future,” he says.
In 2020, a global workshop brought together researchers and public health experts from North America, the EU and Russia to discuss the risks of diseases emerging from melting Arctic permafrost and ice.
The UN Environment Programme has described thawing permafrost as one of the top 10 emerging issues of environmental concern. This speaks to the importance of funding research efforts – and ensuring that the findings reach those who need them most.
Similarly, the United Nations General Assembly has declared a Decade of Action for Cryospheric Sciences, which will run until 2034 and aims to promote research and resilience in frozen regions.
But beyond science, it’s also about equipping communities to respond to change.
This means better understanding how their infrastructure and livelihoods will be affected, as well as providing the resources they need to adapt, says Gartler.
“Adaptability is extremely important in Arctic cultures,” she emphasizes. “If you’re not capable of adapting to whatever nature is throwing at you, then you won’t survive in the Arctic.”
“For some people, there’s this underlying sense of fatalism: you can’t do anything about it – you just have to adapt.”
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