Deep in the frozen ground of the north, a radioactive hazard has lain trapped for millennia. But UK scientist Paul Glover realized some years back that it wouldn’t always be that way: One day it might get out.
Glover had attended a conference where a speaker described the low permeability of permafrost — ground that remains frozen for at least two years or, in some cases, thousands. It is an icy shield, a thick blanket that locks contaminants, microbes and molecules below foot — and that includes the cancer-causing radioactive gas radon.
“It immediately occurred to me that, well, if there is radon underground, it will be trapped there by a layer of permafrost,” recalls Glover, a petrophysicist at the University of Leeds in England. “What happens if that layer suddenly isn’t there anymore?” Ever since then, Glover has worked on methods to estimate how much radon — which is released as the element radium decays — might be liberated as climate change causes the permafrost to thaw.
