[Music rises] Sturm: What we're looking at is a lecacy of the ice age.
Permafrost and methane
is a time machine.
So what we’re going to do is walk back in time. We’re gonna see old carbon,
old bones, old environments.
And none of those are in equilibrium with today’s climate so that’s the problem.
That world doesn’t exist anymore and it hasn’t for 10,000 years.
It was nicely and very delicately
separated from this modern warmer climate by about
this much moss. And when that moss goes away
whether through fire or for human disturbance
or for warming, then all hell breaks loose.
[lively opening credit music]
[music fades]
Narrator: Permafrost – it’s maybe the part of the cryosphere that’s most out of sight
… and mind. It’s fascinating how it formed in the first place,
and how it got loaded with so much carbon.
In a minute, we’ll go back underground with Matthew Sturm from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
But first let’s meet Peter Griffith,
NASA’s project manager for the ABoVE Campaign, which supports more than
70 science projects studying changing forests and tundra vegetation,
wild fires, animals like birds, caribou,
and Dall sheep, methane emissions from expanding northern lakes,
and the impacts of climate change on people in Alaska, Canada
… and around the world. Many of those projects have some direct
connection to the permafrost. Griffith: Permafrost is the
hidden cryosphere. It’s the permanently frozen soil
that surrounds the Arctic. All across Alaska and northern Canada and then
across Eurasia, the ground has been frozen
during the Ice Ages.
Narrator: During the ice ages, there was not enough snowfall in the drier regions of Alaska and Canada
to form glaciers there, so the land was suitable for vegetation.
Griffith: What happened is that over thousands and thousands of years, all of that
plant material got compacted and frozen every winter and buried
and pushed down, so that today, there’s 300 feet deep
of frozen water and dead plants and
some pieces of dead animals, too. Sometimes, you’d find
woolly mammoths in the permafrost. But most of it,
of the organic matter as we call it in the permafrost
is frozen plant material.
Narrator: Some of that plant material is now thawing and decaying, releasing its ancient
carbon into the atmosphere, sometimes in the form of methane gas
bubbling out of expanding northern lakes.
Griffith: We started this field campaign because
the Arctic is the part of the planet that is warming first and fastest
and there are consequences to this for permafrost.
During the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, we’re studying permafrost
with people on the ground, from aircraft flying
over the region, and also from satellites in space.
Narrator: Another way to understand the permafrost is take a walk
below ground with Matthew Sturm, and into the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permafrost tunnel.
Griffith: And they’ve dug this tunnel back into the side of a hill about 200 feet.
And it goes sort of sloping down,
so that by the end of the tunnel, you’re about 100 feet underground.
And you’re surrounded by bones sticking out of the wall
from the steppe bison and the mastodons
that are frozen in it. There’s sticks that are 40,000 years old
you know, that you can touch with your hand. There’s grass that’s still green
that’s tens of thousands of years because it got frozen
right away and it’s never lost the green color.
Narrator: But as fascinating as it is to see these relics of an ancient era,
or to see a tree split in half by thawing soil,
or even to light a ball of methane on fire from under winter ice …
at the end of the day Peter and his colleagues want to know just how much organic matter
is frozen in that permafrost, and how fast it might be released.
Griffith: Currently we think that there is
something on the order of two to three times
as much carbon locked up as
frozen organic matter and permafrost, as there is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
So, releasing
all of that organic carbon from permafrost into the atmosphere,
would be a real game-changer. That would be a tremendous
transformation of the planet’s atmosphere. Now, the good news
is that it would take a very, very long time for that to happen.
However, we are warming the planet
at a rate now that calls in to question, how quickly
is that changing, and what the consequences
in the near future and in the far future are going to be.
[Music, sounds of a crowd chatting]
Neumann: You're in a field, somewhere in California at four in the morning.
It's sort of surreal in a way. Because, you've put so much time into it for
so long, and actually seeing it over there is like ... [laughs]
Whoa, you know! It's a, it's a big deal.