Homes are sinking and trees are tipping over in Alaska. Mammoth bones are surfacing in the Russian Far East — so many that people have begun selling the tusks as a substitute for elephant ivory. And in 2016, more than 70 people in western Siberia were hospitalized for exposure to anthrax, likely spread from a decades-old reindeer carcass that thawed from frozen ground.
In 2016, meltwater seeped into the entrance tunnel of the Global Seed Vault, a subterranean facility in Arctic Norway nicknamed the Doomsday Vault. There, millions of collected seeds are supposed to stay frozen indefinitely, with little upkeep, a safeguard to restart agriculture should the world’s crops be lost in a large-scale disaster. No seeds were harmed — the water refroze long before reaching the vault — but the breach made the world wonder: Will the Doomsday Vault last until doomsday?
The events are connected, caused by the same phenomenon: They occurred in regions covered in permafrost, ground that should stay frozen throughout the year but is now thawing because of global warming.
Permafrost covers about 25 percent of all ice-free land in the Northern Hemisphere. For millennia, much of this ground has been a cemented mass of soil, rock and ice, along with bits of organisms preserved from decay in a deep freeze.
