More than half the population of Chukotka and Magadan have fled the permafrost since the Soviet Union's collapse.
Arctic ground squirrels survive body temperatures as low as 27 degrees Fahrenheit without freezing, during their long hibernation in the permafrost.
The permafrost underneath those trees is melting, exposing deep layers of peat soil that has locked away carbon for thousands of years.
Around one-fifth of the world's land area lies within the permafrost zone.
As water moves through affected areas, it picks up both nutrients and sediment that would otherwise be held in the permafrost's icy grasp.
Later today we will travel to the Permafrost Tunnel, a unique research facility that allows scientists to study the composition and behavior of ice structures and frozen bioorganics dating over 40, 000 years old!
If that is correct, the arm, which is fitted with a scoop and a second camera, should be able to dig into the permafrost, photograph its details and bring samples back into the main body of the probe for analysis.
Or the permafrost melts, adding methane.
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Measurements from orbit suggest that the martian permafrost is within half a metre of the surface.
This could be due to the thawing of the Northern permafrost and increased emissions from tropical wetlands.
Such anxiety looks premature: house-price rises represent a thawing in the property permafrost rather than a market on fire.
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In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost.
Many climate scientists say their biggest fear is that warming could melt the Arctic permafrost which stretches for thousands of miles across Alaska, Canada, and Siberia.
Given this record, it is hardly surprising that the increasingly influential environmental movement in the USSR is alarmed at the prospect of still greater energy exploitation in ecologically fragile areas like the Caspian Sea, the Bering Sea and the Siberian permafrost.
Increased evaporation from the exposed sea should also mean more snowfall to compensate for the ice cap's losses (though together with rapid erosion at the margins this could increase the gradient of the ice cap, making it less stable.) But this is small consolation for another big fear: rapid thawing of the Arctic permafrost.
We saw and heard about the impacts, from slumping land due to the melting of permafrost to hunter stories about the northward migration of species and the challenge that early ice break up poses for transportation.
For things that clearly do have the springlike quality of shifting irreversibly if pulled (or pushed) too far, like the collapse of ice sheets or the melting of permafrost, a boundary system that seeks to stop you getting too close to the threshold seems as sensible as a safety rail is on a parapet.
About half of the route is across permafrost, which poses particular challenges because of the danger of subsidence caused by melting at the surface in summer.
The Odyssey orbiter first reported in 2001 that the region was rich in water ice, mostly in the form of permafrost.
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Last, the project will try to work out how thawing permafrost will affect the numerous streams, rivers and lakes of the Arctic.
Mr Smith, the engineer, warns that melting permafrost a mix of frozen mud and water that underlies much of the state will force the replacement of buildings and roads.
The mountain, he claimed, has already lost some 82% of its permafrost since 1912 - and 33% of this in the past two decades.
" Recent changes in shelf hydrography in the Siberian Arctic: Potential for subsea permafrost instability", by I.
The records from a particularly warm period called Marine Isotopic Stage 11, which occurred around 400, 000 years ago, suggest that warming of 1.5C compared to the present is enough to cause substantial thawing of permafrost - even in areas far north from its present-day southern limit.
"The stalactites and stalagmites from these caves are a way of looking back in time to see how warm periods similar to our modern climate affect how far permafrost extends across Siberia, " said Dr Anton Vaks from the University of Oxford.
The series of 27 panels uses satellite images to show the threats facing these unique places, including shrinking glaciers, coral bleaching, disappearing permafrost, desertification and floods.
When building on permafrost in northern Quebec, non-profit group Archimede Systems had to take into account the melt-and-freeze cycles of the seasons, the need to insulate heat, prevent condensation, and the necessity to keep the home from melting into the icy ground during a thaw.
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