Translating Newfound Permafrost Knowledge into Climate Action

Photo from the Yukon and the 2012 Expedition by the COPER group of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany (Summer 2012). Photo: Boris Radosavljevic

Permafrost thaw is one of the world’s most pressing climate problems, already disrupting lifestyles, livelihoods, economies, and ecosystems in the north, and threatening to spill beyond the boundaries of the Arctic as our planet continues to warm. To examine the effects of permafrost degradation, and increase our understanding of what this phenomenon means for the future of the region (and the world), The Arctic Institute’s new two-part permafrost series aims to analyze the topic from scientific, security, legal, and personal perspectives.

The Arctic Institute Permafrost Series 2020

• Permafrost Thaw in a Warming World: The Arctic Institute’s Permafrost Series Fall-Winter 2020
• Takeaways from the Arctic Tundra
• Dwindling Arctic Sea Ice and Impacts to Permafrost Health
• Frozen-Ground Cartoons: A Multiform Innovative Project for Permafrost Science Communication and Outreach
• The Intersection of U.S. Military Infrastructure & Alaskan Permafrost Through the 21st Century
• When ‘Perma’ Is No Longer ‘Perma’: Investigating Permafrost Degradation in Churchill, Manitoba
• A Blessing and a Curse: Melting Permafrost in the Russian Arctic
• Carbon: Three Observations on Life, Death, and Uncertainty in the Permafrost
• Translating Newfound Permafrost Knowledge into Climate Action

When you stand facing an exposed edge of permafrost, you can feel it from a distance.

It emanates a cold that tugs on every one of your senses. Permanently bound by ice year after year, the frozen soil is packed with carcasses of woolly mammoths and ancient ferns. They’re unable to decompose at such low temperatures, so they stay preserved in perpetuity – until warmer air thaws their remains and releases the cold that they’ve kept cradled for centuries.

I first experienced that distinct cold in the summer of 2016. I was traveling across Arctic Europe with a team of researchers to study climate change impacts. We were a few hours past the Finnish border in Russia when we stopped to first set foot on the tundra. The ground was soft but solid beneath our feet, covered with mosses and wildflowers that stretched into the distance until abruptly interrupted by a slick, towering wall of thawing permafrost.

As we stood facing the muddy patch of uncovered earth, the sensation of escaping cold felt terrifying.

The northern hemisphere is covered by 9m sq miles of permafrost. This solid ground, and all the organic material it contains, is one of the largest greenhouse gas stores on the planet. Frozen, it poses little threat to the 4 million people that call the Arctic home, or to the 7.8 billion of us that call Earth home. But defrosted by rising temperatures, thawing permafrost poses a planetary risk.

When the organic material begins to decompose, permafrost thaw can destabilize major infrastructure, discharge mercury levels dangerous to human health and release billions of metric tons of carbon. We witnessed small-scale damage in Russia that summer through slumped landscapes and uneven roads. At the time, the larger, more dramatic changes were predicted to unfold over the course of this century.

Four years later, those changes are happening much sooner than scientists predicted. The carbon-laden cold of the Arctic’s permafrost is leaking into Earth’s atmosphere, and we are not ready for the consequences.

In June, the Russian Arctic reached 100.4F, the highest temperature in the Arctic since record-keeping began in 1885. The heat shocked scientists, but was not a unique or unusual event in a climate-changed world. The Arctic is warming at nearly three times the rate of the global average, and June’s single-day high was part of a month-long heatwave. This relentless heat has melted sea ice and made traditional subsistence dangerous for skilled Indigenous hunters. It’s fueled costly wildfires, some of which are so strong they now last from one summer to the next. And it’s sped up permafrost thaw, buckling roads and displacing entire communities.

Watching the heat of 2020 devastate the Arctic, I think back to the fear we experienced while watching that permafrost thaw in 2016, but I also remember feeling hopeful.

Just weeks before our expedition began, 174 countries had signed the Paris agreement on the first day it opened for signatures. Barack Obama and China’s President Xi Jinping released a joint statement of climate commitments for the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters. It seemed like every world leader had finally dedicated themselves to climate action. Throughout our trip across the Arctic, my colleagues and I discussed the difficulties of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, but, with the momentum of Paris, we agreed that it was still possible to contain a climate catastrophe.

It is much harder to find hope today than it was four years ago – but it’s not impossible.

The Arctic’s skies are blackened with wildfire smoke and we are not even halfway through summer. The Trump administration has reversed 100 environmental rules and has now officially pulled the US out of the Paris agreement.

Climate change cannot be stopped. The Arctic’s ice will melt and large swaths of frozen ground will thaw. With every degree we allow our world to warm, the more we lose. This past fall, The Arctic Institute’s first installment of our Permafrost series explored what stands to be lost to impacts of permafrost degradation, from future health and planetary wellbeing to our very ability to remember the past. Authors expanded our understanding of frozen ground through military history and cartoon communication; through permafrost’s connection to dwindling Arctic sea ice and connection to place. In winter 2021, seven more authors will examine the question of permafrost degradation from personal, scientific, securitization, and legal perspectives.

But here’s the thing – it is not enough to investigate the challenges of permafrost degradation in the Arctic. Knowledge is power only if it is used towards cooperative solutions. And so here is my winter break homework to you, our readers: As you read the first seven papers of our Permafrost Series from this fall and await the next installment, think of how to translate that newfound knowledge into action. 

Perhaps it is sharing what you learned with five friends, or endeavoring to learn more about permafrost degradation before Part II of the series is released. You could join The Arctic Institute’s Research Coordination Network and work with other researchers to better understand how permafrost changes impact Arctic migrations, or get in touch with ideas for how we reach further together in new programming.

Ultimately, climate action is not powered by the Paris agreement – it’s powered by people. Every individual has a skill, a voice, a career to wield as a tool to address climate change. From presidents to protesters, we each have a part to play in limiting the devastation of the climate crisis.What climate catastrophes we bear in the decades to come are a direct consequence of what we choose to do today. And as the Arctic’s permafrost thaws, we cannot afford climate silence from anyone. The cost of inaction is too high.

A version of this commentary first appeared in The Guardian on August 11, 2020.