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Tired troops. Muddy terrain. Well-armed Ukrainians. The war’s new stage may be a challenge for Putin’s forces.
The key questions are whether, eight weeks into this war, the Russians have learned any lessons from their disastrous first phase and whether the terrain of the new campaign—open fields just across their own border—will give them an advantage in the fight.
Either way, this next stage of the conflict is likely to be even bloodier than the first—a long war of attrition, including tank-on-tank battles, the likes of which haven’t been fought in Europe since World War II. This week, both sides were still preparing for the onslaughts, firing artillery shells at each other’s positions, hoping to wear down their stamina and morale before the grueling part of the fighting begins.
For weeks now, Russian tank battalions have been lining up all across the 300-mile border with Ukraine, with the goal—once the fighting begins in full force—of breaking through the defenses, then enveloping the Ukrainian soldiers from all sides.
This tactic works both ways: The Ukrainians will try to punch a hole in the offensive line, then envelop the Russian soldiers—and, at the same time, cut off Russian supply lines. (Helpfully, Russia’s supply lines in the East are dependent on rail tracks, which Ukrainians have been adept at blowing up.)
The stakes are larger than Donbas, a region rich in coal and industry, with about 6 percent of Ukraine’s population. The Russians are continuing to step up the pressure all over Ukraine, bombing and shelling civilian and military targets in Kyiv, Lviv, and other cities to the west, as well as blockading Mariupol in the southeast. If Putin wins in Donbas, he might revive his scuttled ambitions to take over the rest of the country or at least to topple President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.
If Putin finds himself on the verge of losing in Donbas, however, he might set off chemical or tactical nuclear weapons in a brash stab at shocking Zelensky and the Western allies into stopping the war before all hell breaks loose. (Russian military doctrine refers to this ploy as “escalate to de-escalate.”) This is the main reason President Joe Biden and some of the European leaders refrain from pushing Putin still harder or intervening in the war directly.
So it is a vital question to ask, even now, which side enters the war’s new phase with the better chance of winning. Sheer geography favors the Russians in some respects. The open terrain will allow Ukrainian soldiers fewer hiding places from which to ambush Russian tank columns, as they did outside of Kyiv.
The region’s proximity to Russia will also mean shorter supply lines—which Ukrainians easily disrupted during those earlier battles, leaving Russian soldiers short of food, fuel, and ammunition. Russia enjoys the advantage of an invader’s initiative, as well. Russian soldiers who fought in the earlier battles are being redeployed to Donbas, thus firming up the numerical edge that Russia already held in troops and firepower.
However, these advantages may not prove decisive.
Biden and some European leaders are rushing not only more anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles but also “heavy weapons”—tanks, armored fighting vehicles, artillery, helicopters, many of which will arrive within days—to Ukrainian units. During the war’s first phase, these leaders had stopped short of sending these deadlier, more mobile, and longer-range weapons, concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin would view them as provocative escalations of NATO’s involvement in the war and therefore might respond by firing chemical or nuclear weapons.
But, worried by Russia’s military reinforcements and its continued bombing of Ukrainian civilians, Biden and the others have relaxed their standards of acceptable risk and are doing more to improve the Ukrainian army’s ability not only to mount guerrilla-type attacks on Russian forces but also to wage conventional warfare.
There is one other factor that should make Russian commanders pessimistic: Their troops are exhausted. This is why the offensive in Donbas is not yet fully underway. Many of the Russian battalions—some redeployed from their failed campaigns in northern and western Ukraine, some newly mobilized from distant bases inside Russia—lost too many troops, tanks, and other weapons to fight as coherent combat units, and it will take a few weeks, if not much longer, to fill in the gaps.
Michael Kofman, a military expert at CNA, whose analyses of the war have proved more prescient than most, tweeted on Wednesday, “Overall I think the Russian military has dramatically reduced combat effectiveness given [the] high level of losses. … They’ve scraped together what was left … to get some reinforcements. It can’t make up for losses.”
One of Russia’s seemingly clear advantages, the open terrain, may prove a bit of a drawback as well. The ground is muddy, which might force the Russian tanks to move in columns on the roads, where they would be vulnerable to anti-tank missiles and drones, or to stay in the fields but get bogged down.
A retired U.S. Army four-star general, who asked that he not be identified, told me in an email that these facts, along with the Russians’ wide-ranging ineptitude so far, “should give us pause as to whether they achieve substantial breakthroughs” against Ukraine’s defenses. At the same time, he continued, “the Ukrainians need to stop the Russians repeatedly.” Even if the Russians don’t manage to break through and envelop Ukraine’s defenses, they might still “push forward across the front lines.”
If this forecast is accurate, the war may settle into a long, bloody slugfest, to be decided not by which side achieves some grand strategic victory but rather by which side simply stays standing a little bit longer.
The possibility of a sustained stalemate has one positive side: It could compel both sides to come to the negotiating table.
Some Russian officials have rationalized their military’s retreat from Kyiv by saying Putin’s real goal all along was to take the Donbas region. Donbas is where the war began—and where Russia and Ukraine have been fighting since 2014 in a conflict that has killed more than 14,000 people, including 500 Russians.
Until this past February, the war pitted separatist militias, aided by Russian arms and special forces, against Ukrainian troops, who at the time were supported but only meagerly supplied by the West. Just before the invasion, Putin formally recognized the two districts of Donbas—Donetsk and Luhansk—as independent “people’s republics.” He publicly justified the invasion as a necessary step to protect Russian speakers in those republics from Ukrainian “genocide.” He and his aides barely mentioned the invasion in other parts of Ukraine, until the heavy Russian casualties—numbering up to 20,000 by some estimates—could no longer be hidden even by the censored state-run media.
Not long after this earlier war got underway, the troops on both sides formed a line of demarcation, with pro-Russia separatists controlling the eastern half of the region and Ukrainian troops controlling the western half. (This roughly corresponded to the areas populated by ethnic Russians and by Ukrainians, respectively.) These lines have barely budged in the eight years since. In 2015, both sides signed the Minsk agreements, which called for a cease-fire and a vaguely worded formula for settling the fate of Donbas, but the accords were never implemented. Still, in the weeks leading up to Putin’s February invasion, U.S. and Russian officials mentioned reviving the Minsk agreements as a possible way out.
If this war ever does end, the peace accord will have to deal with Donbas in some way. The outcome of the battle for Donbas, if there ever is a clear outcome, may pave the way to an accord or make it still harder to achieve.
People help an elderly woman to walk in a street, in front of an apartment building hit by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine. (photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)IRE,
A small metal dart, called fléchette, found embedded in the body of man killed in Bucha. (photo: Alessio Mamo)
Chris Smalls, interim president of the Amazon Labor Union, celebrates a successful vote. (photo: Yana Paskova/WP)
Elon Musk and Chris Anderson, the head of TED, during an interview in Vancouver, Canada, on 14 April. (photo: Stacie Mcchesney/TED/AFP/Getty Images)
US billionaires now own a combined $4.7tn, according to a new analysis – but to Elon Musk, since he doesn’t have a yacht or own a home, that’s totally OK
“We’re all in this together.” Remember that corny catchphrase from the early days of the pandemic? Remember when there was a smidgen of hope that the collective trauma the world was facing would reshape people’s priorities and the pandemic could be a portal to a better, fairer society?
Well, two years on, precisely none of that has happened. People clapped for essential workers for a bit but didn’t stop exploiting them. Meanwhile it’s boom time for billionaires, who saw their already obscene wealth grow exponentially during the pandemic. A new analysis released by Oxfam America on Monday, to mark tax day in the US, found US billionaires now own a combined $4.7tn in wealth. Much of this goes untaxed; last year ProPublica analyzed leaked tax returns and found the 25 richest people in the US paid a true tax rate of just 3.4% from 2014 to 2018. The average taxpayer, meanwhile, pays a true tax rate of 13%. It wasn’t always like this. As Oxfam notes, it really wasn’t that long ago that the ultra-wealthy paid their fair share in tax; during the second world war, the federal income tax rate peaked at 94% and was still 70% three decades later. The rich haven’t just gotten richer, they’ve also gotten a lot more selfish.
While billionaires have seen their bank accounts balloon and corporations are raking in record profits, ordinary people are hurting from decades-high inflation. By some accounts, the inequality gap in the US is worse now than it was in France in the 1780s just before the French Revolution. It’s easy to get angry about all this, but you might want to wait a moment before jumping to the seemingly obvious conclusion that gross inequality is bad and we really ought to do something about it. You see, in a recent (embarrassingly fawning) interview with Chris Anderson, the head of Ted, Elon Musk helpfully billionaire-splained why it’s actually OK for a handful of people to hoard obscene amounts of wealth.
“There are many people out there who can’t stand this world of billionaires,” Anderson said to Musk in the interview. “Like, they are hugely offended by the notion that an individual can have the same wealth as, say, a billion or more of the world’s poorest people.”
Only an idiot would be offended by something like that, Musk essentially replied. “I think there’s some axiomatic flaws that are leading them to that conclusion,” he told Anderson. “For sure, it would be very problematic if I was consuming, you know, billions of dollars a year in personal consumption. But that is not the case. In fact, I don’t even own a home right now. I’m literally staying at friends’ places … I don’t have a yacht, I really don’t take vacations. It’s not as though my personal consumption is high.”
Musk, who is worth almost $300bn, did concede that the one exception to his incredibly ascetic lifestyle is his $70m private jet, but said its use was justified because it gives him more hours to work. It’s essentially in the public good.
So there you go. Put down your pitchforks everyone! Stop sharpening your guillotines! Anyone getting angry about inequality simply needs to examine their “axiomatic flaws”. It’s perfectly OK that the world’s billionaires have more wealth than 60% of the world’s population combined, as long as they buy private jets instead of yachts and couchsurf at their mate’s mansion instead of paying property tax on their own house. Really glad Musk cleared that up for us all.
French president Emmanuel Macron celebrates with supporters in front of the Eiffel Tower Paris, France, on Sunday. (photo: Rafael Yaghobzadeh/AP)
Researcher Nicholas Hasson, right, talks with Kathy Lenniger, left, a property owner in Fairbanks' Goldstream Valley. Permafrost melt is creating sinkholes and undermining the structural integrity of homes, wells, septic systems, and roads. (photo: Sean McDermott/Grist)
As permafrost thaws, the ground beneath Alaska is collapsing.
Lenniger lives in a log cabin in Goldstream Valley, a spruce-lined swale with a rolling view of the Northern Lights near Fairbanks. “It’s the birthplace of American permafrost research, actually,” said Hasson, a Ph.D. student at the nearby University of Alaska Fairbanks, or UAF. During World War II, the military feared the ribbons of dancing light were interfering with its radar, so Congress passed an act in 1946 establishing the Geophysical Institute at UAF. Soon, scientists were investigating the strange phenomena in the sky and drilling boreholes around Goldstream Valley to study the frozen ground beneath their feet.
Since then, temperatures in Fairbanks have shifted so much that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially changed the city’s subarctic designation in 2021, downgrading it to “warm summer continental.” As the climate warms, the ancient ice that used to cover an estimated 85 percent of Alaska is thawing. As it streams away, there are places where the ground is now collapsing. Many of the valley’s spruce trees lean drunkenly. Sometimes, only a thin layer of soil covers yawning craters where the ice has vanished, what Hasson calls “ghost ice wedges.” Its absence has already fundamentally changed how — and where — people can live.
When Lenniger built her cabin several decades ago, she didn’t expect she’d need to regularly jack up her foundation. But for the last several years, she said, “if I have some water on my counter now, it rolls in this direction. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s sinking again.’” At first, she tried to fill the sinkholes popping up around her property with bones from the meat she fed her sled dogs, but eventually the pits grew large enough to strand a backhoe. Despite living in perhaps the most-studied permafrost valley in the country, Lenniger didn’t know how much worse her troubles might get — until Hasson offered to help.
On a muggy afternoon last summer, Hasson prepared to try to find out why Lenniger’s cabin was sinking. He pulled on a backpacking frame he’d jury-rigged to receive very low-frequency radio waves from antennae in Hawaii, recording the modulations of the electric field to map the permafrost beneath the duff. The colors of the aurora come from the charged particles of solar wind, which collide with oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth’s ionosphere and create a glowing halo. The free electrons from these collisions can reflect radio waves, helping Hasson understand how permafrost is thawing below the surface. Combined with a $40,000 laser he dragged behind him on a plastic sled he’d nicknamed “The Coffin,” Hasson is able to link surface methane emissions to the ice disappearing underground.
As he scrambled off Lenniger’s driveway into the brush, Hasson explained, “It’s just like an MRI — we’re able to scan and see where water is flowing.” Walking across her yard, he found a new underground river had formed under a corner of Lenniger’s home, which explained why her land had caved in.
The permafrost around Fairbanks is discontinuous; jagged pieces of it finger north-facing slopes and enfold the low-lying valleys. Yet potential homebuyers who want to avoid it are left to guesswork. “There’s no comprehensive map of permafrost,” said Kellen Spillman, the director of the department of community planning for the Fairbanks North Star Borough. For those like Lenniger, whose properties later develop thaw-related problems, there’s little recourse, either from insurance or the government. The University of Alaska Fairbanks, home to much of the state’s permafrost research, has itself struggled with recurring sinkholes on its roads and parking lots. “We have invested funding to rebuild,” said Cameron Wohlford, director of design and construction at the school’s facilities, “only to have them fail.”
Homeowners around Alaska’s second-largest city are facing expensive repairs, or even having their properties condemned. Hasson eventually traced the river running beneath Lenniger’s property to her neighbor’s, where the owner, Judy Gottschalk, reported that her septic pipes had broken as the ground settled. “My well went out this winter, too,” she said. Not knowing where else the ghost ice lies, Gottschalk has been nervous about putting in a new septic system. The drilling and construction required to replace it would cost her as much as $45,000, more than she originally paid for her house. “Everyone I know is having problems with their housing,” Lenniger said.
As parts of Alaska set record high temperatures in December, Fairbanks closed out 2021 with a destructive ice storm, causing roofs to collapse. A warmer Arctic is also a wetter Arctic, accelerating the breakdown of permafrost, explained Tom Douglas, a senior scientist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, in Fairbanks. “For every centimeter of rain, we see about one centimeter of additional top-down thaw,” he said. On average, Fairbanks now sees about five more weeks of rain than it did in the 1970s.
“In my 47 years here, I’ve never seen these kinds of conditions before,” Lenniger said. She has a lot of practice finding creative ways to take on Alaska’s hurdles: Before phone lines went in, she and her partner used homing pigeons to communicate while mushing, though she said she was unfazed when the birds were devoured by owls. But now, the rapid changes are testing her ability to cope. “Every day, it’s like now what will happen?”
Just as the earth clings to its former shape, leaving a record of where ice used to be, the very language used to describe these changes is revealing. The word permafrost, after all, is simply an abbreviation of “permanently frozen ground.” Much of Alaska’s permafrost is tens to hundreds of thousands of years old, first frozen when Goldstream Valley was grazed by mammoths. Now, that sense of immutability is slipping. “It was thought to be permanent — that any changes happened on a scale of tens of thousands of years,” said Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor emeritus of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a leading permafrost researcher.
Many variables influence permafrost’s stability, like how cold it is, how deep it runs, and the quantity of soil moisture, or its “ice richness.” In some parts of Alaska, ice extends nearly a half-mile below the surface, while in others, it has formed the landscape itself, sprouting tundra-covered ice hills called pingos.
Since 1993, Romanovsky has been taking field data from stations around the state, recording their increasing temperatures. At all of the 350 stations, soil temperatures have warmed substantially, and thaw is inching down to deeper depths. On the North Slope, one of Alaska’s coldest ice-rich regions, “when we started it was about -8, and now it’s -4 degrees Celsius, so we’re already halfway to zero,” he said. Dramatic changes will increase once this melting point between frozen and liquid is hit. He predicts that within 40 years, the Slope will be “at a critical threshold in normal, undisturbed conditions.”
Off the North Slope, this tipping point will be reached sooner. Any time soil or vegetation is disturbed — as the Army Corps of Engineers discovered in 1942 while trying to build a highway to Alaska — permafrost has a tendency to disintegrate into truck-swallowing mud. It’s a similar story with roads built in recent decades. Jeff Currey, materials engineer for the northern region of Alaska’s Department of Transportation & Public Facilities, explains that as ice wedges degrade under the state’s highways and airports, the asphalt heaves and drops, creating a dangerous roller-coaster effect. Because Alaska has relatively few roads across its 665,000 square miles, the ones it has are critical connections.
“Warming temperatures are contributing to increasing maintenance and damage,” Currey said. “Anecdotally, we’re having to fix the same places more frequently, and more intensively.”
Mitigation measures can help, from the low-tech approach of using gravel to channel cold air against embankments to high-tech thermosiphons, tubes that channel warmth aboveground during the winter to help keep the soil frozen. But Alaska’s budget for maintenance is largely dictated by the state legislature, and Currey calls the annual $330 million allotted to the northern region in recent years “inadequate.” Currey explains the average road is typically built to last around 30 years, but that’s largely based on expected traffic, not whether the road will be thermally stable. An independent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that, as a result of climate change, the state will have to spend billions more on maintaining and repairing public infrastructure by the end of the century. Despite budget shortfalls, Currey predicts that “maintenance efforts simply have to increase.” In many cases, “we’ll tolerate rougher and worse roads than we do now — that will just be the economic reality.”
Around Fairbanks, elevating buildings to keep their heat from leaking into permafrost or designing structures to be adjusted isn’t new. Re-leveling houses as a cheap way to adjust to moving ground is an Alaskan tradition. “My grandparents used to chase the corners on their cabin when it moved, like everybody,” said Aaron Cooke, an architect and researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Cold Climate Housing Research Center, who has worked on these issues in many communities around the state. But with climate change, the old engineering tricks that helped keep permafrost frozen aren’t sufficient. “The ground is changing, even if you do everything right.”
To understand the scale of the impact when it starts to melt, Cooke said, you have to understand that “to someone in the north, the natural state of the ground, the default status of Earth, is frozen. And thousands of years of culture are built on that knowledge.” While the impacts of permafrost thaw — subsidence, flooding, sinkholes, and landslides — mimic the devastation of natural disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency isn’t responsible for permafrost damage, and it’s difficult to get covered by homeowner’s insurance. “How fast does a disaster need to move for a department that handles disasters to address it?” Cooke asked.
Romanovsky predicts that within a decade, the destruction in most parts of Alaska will get worse. “I’m worrying about my house as well,” he said. But regions with continuous and ice-rich permafrost, like those in northwest Alaska, will see the worst damage. “It will be the major problem driving relocation,” he said, “but these changes need to be understood at high resolution — for each village, for each house, you need to know what to expect.”
Where the Chukchi Sea bites into the North American continent, ice loss has driven thousands of walruses to the beaches of Point Lay, in northwest Alaska within the Arctic Circle. The predominately Iñupiat community, home to around 300 people, is wrestling with the loss of ice, too: In 2016, the lake they relied on for drinking water disappeared overnight after the ice wedge it rested on eroded, forcing the town to pump water from a nearby river. This year, one of the town’s holding tanks failed, spilling almost a million gallons. “Apparently, permafrost was melting under us,” said Lupita Henry, the Native Village of Point Lay’s former tribal president. “There are cracks in homes, doors that can’t close, houses that are so angled they seem unlivable.”
Now 40 years old, Henry was a young girl when the town’s first underground sewer lines were put in; many of them have since broken as the ground settled. The borough government recently installed new electric poles, which are already starting to lean. Like in many rural Alaskan communities, there’s a shortage of housing, but Henry said the thawing permafrost makes it difficult to build or even get a loan for a new home. “Where do you get your insurance? Through which bank can you finance to even get your home fixed?” she asked. “When the ground is falling underneath you, what do you do?”
In 2018, the state recognized a new hazard: usteq, a word from the Alaska Native Yup’ik language that describes the catastrophic land collapse stemming from thawing permafrost, and the erosion and flooding it entails. As sea ice disappears, the coast has been battered by intensifying storm surges, speeding the breakdown of permafrost under the shore. Riverbanks are corroding from thaw, changing everything from the chemistry of the groundwater to its distribution and movement. Permafrost, Henry said, “is linked to everything — our homes, water sources, food sources, vegetation.”
Point Lay is now working with researchers on a Navigating the New Arctic project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to try to determine the best engineering for building on its ice-rich and unstable ground. It’s all complicated by the fact that the remote town can only be reached by plane or barge, making construction more difficult. Even before the pandemic, supplies were regularly delayed. “All of the problems overlap,” said Jana Peirce, the project’s coordinator. Point Lay can apply to FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program for help in adapting to permafrost thaw; the federal agency is now proactively trying to intervene, because the cost of responding to emergencies is, on average, six times more expensive than mitigation. But to do so, Point Lay will need an up-to-date hazard mitigation plan, and to form a plan, they need to know where the ground ice is, and how it might melt. “While there is no question that planning is important for smart adaptation,” Peirce said, “for a small community already living in crisis, this is just another hurdle.”
In the 2019 Alaska Statewide Threat Assessment, which set out to summarize the risks permafrost presents, Point Lay is ranked as one of the top three communities under threat from permafrost thaw. Yet aid has been slow in coming. “You tell them you need a water source, that your land is melting underneath you — how many meetings do I have to have until I’m given funding?” Henry asked. In March 2022, Point Lay became the first town in Alaska to declare a climate emergency, acknowledging the threat to their existence.
Towns across Alaska are facing similar challenges: The statewide threat assessment found that 89 of Alaska’s 336 communities are threatened by permafrost degradation. “The main barriers to addressing these threats include the lack of site-specific data to inform the development of solutions, and the lack of funding to implement repairs and proactive solutions,” Max Neale, senior program manager for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, wrote in an email. “We have yet to see significant engagement from state and federal partners to improve the efficacy and equitability of programs for communities facing climate change and environmental threats.”
In 2020, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that federal assistance for climate migration has been ad hoc, and that the federal government is nowhere near prepared for the scale of relocation required. Cooke says temperate parts of the world simply don’t seem to have registered the urgency of Arctic change. He’s spent over a decade racing to help relocate Alaskan towns like Shishmaref or Kivalina, which, despite being deemed in imminent danger back in 2003, have not yet completed their move. But when he attends climate change conferences, “it’s very jarring to hear people still talking in the future tense.”
For many Alaskans, the emergency is already here. “If we can get a good idea of how much permafrost we’re sitting on top of,” Henry said, slowly, “we can try to get the federal government to help us with mitigation, or decide if we have to relocate.” Although facing a crisis, people in Point Lay are used to the idea of building for an uncertain future. “Don’t put any pity on us,” Henry said. “We’re strong people who survived thousands of years — and we will continue surviving.”
The scale of the problem is daunting, but there’s surprisingly little agreement on how much dealing with a thawing Arctic will cost. Over a dozen experts interviewed for this article admitted they weren’t sure how many Americans live on permafrost; a recent paper published in Population and Environment suggested a ballpark of around 170,000 people. Nor can anyone agree how much ice is where, much less how it might thaw.
Nearly a third of Arctic research is based on data from just two field stations: Abisko, Sweden, and Toolik Lake, Alaska. And researchers usually collect data during the Arctic’s short summer field season, even though winter conditions may look very different, making conclusions less accurate. For instance, recent studies have found that emissions of carbon and methane released by thawing permafrost have been drastically underestimated. There are 1.6 trillion metric tons of carbon currently stored in permafrost — twice what’s now in the atmosphere. New projections suggest that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost could equal those emitted from the rest of the United States by the end of the century.
“It’s clear that the models are not capturing all the key pieces,” said Anna Liljedahl, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who is based in Homer, Alaska.
Research attempting to settle these questions generally falls into one of two camps. There’s top-down, like Liljedahl’s work with the Permafrost Discovery Gateway, which uses high-resolution satellite imagery to record thaw slumps and surface water changes. Machine learning and supercomputers have helped Liljedahl closely map visible ice wedges, creating a more comprehensive view of the Arctic, but can only infer what’s under the surface through identifying types of soil or vegetation.
The second approach is bottom-up: Romanovsky’s boreholes, for instance, deliver very detailed measurements from specific places, but researchers have to extrapolate to draw larger conclusions. Yet all permafrost is not equal. Take a type of permafrost called yedoma: frozen, silty muck from the Pleistocene era that releases 10 times more greenhouse gases than other types of thawing ice. Additionally, research indicates yedoma-rich regions may be warming the most quickly. So knowing how much yedoma there is, and where, is critical.
Scientists like Hasson hope to advance a third approach using airborne imaging spectroscopy, essentially mounting a fancier version of the laser on his sled to planes, a more efficient research method. This technique can detect large methane emissions, and Hasson can then use very low radio frequencies to identify what’s happening below the surface, identifying methane hotspots and providing information on the scale that infrastructure planning requires.
“The question is, why aren’t we doing this method at scale?” Hasson said. “Why am I not in a plane right now flying over Alaska?” The Department of Energy considers permafrost thaw and its emissions a threat to national security, and is partly funding Hasson’s research, along with NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Much is at stake. Dmitry Streletskiy, a geographer at George Washington University, explained that long before ice begins to thaw, warming decreases permafrost’s ability to support structures. In the spring of 2020, the 800-mile Trans-Alaskan Pipeline reported its first instance of “slope creep,” as thawing permafrost jeopardized its structural integrity. That’s likely what happened in the Siberian city of Norilsk a few months later, where thawing ruptured a huge fuel reservoir, prompting a cataclysmic diesel spill that dyed the region’s rivers blood-red.
Streletskiy started his career focused on ecosystems, but realized that “unless you put monetary values to things, it doesn’t get much attention. His most recent study found that 70 percent of major Arctic infrastructure is in areas that permafrost thaw could put at risk of damage within the next 30 years, increasing maintenance costs by $15.5 billion dollars, as well as causing another $21.6 billion in damages. And those are the paper’s most conservative estimates.
While Russia likely has the lion’s share of the world’s population living on permafrost, alpine countries like France and Switzerland will also see mountain slopes start to lose their stability, resulting in hazardous landslides. A recent study published in Population and Environment found that 3.3 million people currently live in settlements where permafrost will degrade by 2050, forcing many to relocate.
“Those who live on permafrost have a pretty good understanding of what will happen in 20 years — they don’t need scientists to tell them,” Streletskiy said. “It’s the people who live in D.C. or Moscow who need to pay attention.”
Up the rippling highway from Lenniger’s cabin in Goldstream Valley, Sam Skidmore shoveled dirt away from a vault door at his gold mine, the entrance to the deepest permafrost tunnel in Alaska. He’d decided to break his rule against opening it when the temperature was above freezing so Hasson could take ice samples. Skidmore stumped down into the darkness, his headlamp gleaming off ice crystals as he passed a wooly mammoth skull poking out of the wall. As they continued deeper, gravel beds betrayed warning signs of past eras, when dramatic warming transformed the landscape. “We’re literally walking back in time,” Skidmore said.
They descended between alternating layers of gravel and silt, passing eons when interior Alaska was an endless grassland steppe and eras when a changing climate shaped the landscape into more familiar forests. “Where we are now [in time], Homo sapiens hadn’t entered America,” said Skidmore, who is preserving the tunnel for research. He poked at a particularly pebbled section, saying it would take “a horrendous amount of rainfall to take all the trees and silt away and make a new layer of gravel like this.”
Today, the Arctic is again confronting dramatic change: As the region’s permafrost continues to thaw, some areas of Alaska will sink and get wetter, while others may dry out and burn, transforming habitats. Other studies show that permafrost under the ocean itself is thawing, reshaping the seafloor, forming craters the size of city blocks and elevating new pingos. For humans and animals alike, responding will be a balancing act, said Dmitry Nicolsky, a research associate professor at the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks. Hazards will combine to create cumulative effects: As wildfires increase, for instance, people are told to cut vegetation away from their houses. “But making a safety buffer in Fairbanks might also cause permafrost degradation,” Nicolsky said.
Almost above Skidmore and Hasson’s heads, on the other side of the tunnel’s glistening roof, was one of the countless lakes that dot Alaska’s interior. In January at 40 degrees below zero, Hasson can drill into its frozen surface and light the escaping methane plumes into towering columns of fire. The lake is also releasing mercury, a toxic metal that could now be accumulating in Alaska’s water sources, as well as radon gas. Other ponds may emit neither, highlighting the importance of identifying not only where greenhouse gases are likely to be released, but new sources of hazards for human health.
Even in attempting to tally these changes, researchers may underestimate nature’s complexity. Liljedahl explained that when ice-rich tundra degrades, it can slump and become a pond. As it fills with moss, a very effective insulator, the underlying permafrost sometimes recovers, eventually filling up the depression with a bonus layer of new organic soil. “Instead of losing, it’s gaining,” she said. “We can’t lock ourselves into the idea that it can only go in one direction.”
Emerging back into the light, Skidmore stared out over the hills, where pockets of birch marked where mining operations disturbed the permafrost a century ago, creating pools and altering the forest. The catastrophic flooding revealed within his tunnel will happen again, he mused. “It’s only a matter of time.”
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