Permafrost

One fifth of the earth's surface is covered by permafrost.

One-fifth of the Earth's surface is covered by permafrost.

Permafrost covers one-fifth of the Earth's surface.

The permafrost is thawing.

In Alaska, thawing of permafrost is responsible for severe damage to roads, buildings, and pipelines that will be costly to replace, especially in remote parts of Alaska.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which measures the impact of global warming, predicts snow cover, glaciers and permafrost will continue to decline in almost all regions throughout this century.

The melting permafrost was key factor in the ecological disaster.

In a statement, scientists from North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk say reindeer herders on Great Lyakhovsky island in the New Siberian Islands archipelago discovered the carcass in the melting permafrost.

Recent years have seen major discoveries of mammoths, woolly rhinos, ice age foal, several puppies and cave lion cubs as the permafrost inside the Arctic Circle melts.

Researchers have discovered that carbon-rich permafrost is thawing at increasingly high rates, likely as a result of human-induced climate change, making the Arctic an important potential source of methane emissions.

Nevertheless, the water molecule is present, as ice, in a solid form in frozen soils or permafrosts, which cover large regions characterised by a polar climate.

In agreement with our overall trends within the permafrost samples, lower nirK and nirS and higher nosZ diversity have been identified in cryoturbated peat vs. unturbated peat soils (Palmer and Horn, 2012 ).