The massive 2015 flooding of the Sagavanirktok River in northern Alaska had immediate impacts, including closure of the Dalton Highway for several days, but it also contributed to longer-term ground subsidence in the permafrost-rich region. That’s the finding by assistant professor Simon Zwieback at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute in a study published […]
Most of Earth’s near-surface permafrost could be gone by 2100, an international team of scientists has concluded after comparing current climate trends to the planet’s climate 3 million years ago. The team found that the amount of near-surface permafrost could drop by 93% compared to the preindustrial period of 1850 to 1900. That’s under the […]
Permafrost in Alaska has been warming and thawing at an increasing rate. The state is actually sinking a little in places. Soumitra Sakhalkar, a graduate research assistant at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, has been using the global navigation satellite system to precisely measure just how much the surface is subsiding in some […]
Standing in the 29-degree air outside a building on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, Josephine Galipon held a pinkie-size vial that may have contained tiny organisms locked in a coma for thousands of years. Galipon, a researcher with Keio University in Japan, needed to work outside a heated room so as not to disturb […]