So the aging question we explored and talked-- helped you think through this phenomenon of zombie cells It kept the permafrost layer compacted, things like that.
This may well be his blood brother. It's where permafrost occurs.
So I just want to zip through a few more photos because they're just wonderful. that could prevent permafrost from melting.
I had to slip that in in case you forgot I was Catholic. Hot like the permafrost releasing methyl hydrates.
So during the spring when the snow melts, the miners collect all the water in these big holding ponds, and then they pump it up to wherever they're trying to wash away that permafrost . And they wash away whatever's thawed and then let it stop for a bit, let the next little few inches thaw, and then wash that away.
And we don't know why it's so well preserved. It's not permafrost here. It's not frozen. But we were able to sequence the genome from this girl, too, and were quite surprised to see that it was not
Dr. Henry Pollack: The comment that, as the regions around the Arctic are thawing out, the permafrost degrading. And that, there's a lot of methane locked in the permafrost that's making its way to the atmosphere. And that's all true. And there is also methane stored in ice just below the ocean floor, which has a huge amount of methane that, if it were destabilized and
"Stop taking this so seriously. Some of which are in good permafrost conditions for the preservation of virological sustainability.
You will be more patient, at least I am. And it's a city on permafrost .
went into the atmosphere that, it too, would add to the greenhouse gas burden of the atmosphere. About the melting of the permafrost -- once again, kind of the first stage of measurements in the permafrost lakes that are developing -- show -- yes, indeed -- there is a methane flux. And how fast that will penetrate -- the melting will penetrate -- and release more, is the big question.
That's a simple thermodynamic effect. And say more carbon is released from melting permafrost and lots of other places. And that's a feedback.
This may well be his blood brother. But when this global warming starts and the permafrost starts to go, then all this archaeological evidence will start to rot, and you'll get back to only just
And they wash away whatever's thawed and then let it stop for a bit, let the next little few inches thaw, and then wash that away. Their goal is to get rid of all of that permafrost to get to the gold-bearing gravels beneath. But while they're doing, that we find hundreds, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of these bones that are incredibly well preserved.
This is an example. This is a horse jaw that we found up in the permafrost near Dawson City that dates to sometime in the last 100,000 years or so. This is one of the very many well-preserved mummies that's been found in Siberia.
Both of those types of horses correspond to the two types of horses that are found in Scythian graves. Some of them are actually mummified by the permafrost and dry conditions, as in these examples. Scythian riders rode bareback.
flux. And how fast that will penetrate -- the melting will penetrate -- and release more, is the big question. Most calculations of the diffusion of heat downward to melt the permafrost and release the methane, shows that it's not a fast problem. It's one that would progress slowly and have a time scale that would be in the centuries, rather than an immediate belching out of large amounts of methane. So while it's nothing to trivialize, it's
But when chunks of thawing ice block the river’s flow, flooding of surrounding areas can occur. That water causes erosion and melts a layer of frozen ground called permafrost , all of which affects the chemical balance of the Yukon River. And that’s not to mention all the damage to local communities.
classic work of Canadian horror, The Wendigo. In the last winter, the melting of the permafrost releases supernatural entities, first into a remote oil drilling camp on the northern slope of Alaska, and then it is implied worldwide.
Now, the woolly mammoth is a good candidate for de-extinction maybe because we have plentiful sources of its DNA. It's quite common place to find tusks and teeth and bones in the melting permafrost of Siberia. And sometimes-- sometimes-- scientists come across stuff like this.
In 2015, just last year, NASA was taking pictures of this same region, and those streaks change over time. The temperature there is warm enough that the frozen ice and the permafrost melts. Sometimes explosions of steam come up from the surface.
Lots of ways to describe that, including some new ones that were used in the introduction just a moment ago. So what does a biologist want to do with frozen bones collected from the permafrost ? Well, my research is actually focused on trying to understand how populations and communities and ecosystems respond to rapid, large scale changes in climate
And there's me in Svalbard last year. Svalbard is also the home of the Global Seed Vault, protected there in the permafrost in case we ever need to reseed the planet in the wake of an environmental catastrophe.
And the neat thing about this is that these are the small pieces, which means that the stuff that's washed downstream. See, these pieces are actually still frozen in the permafrost . We can't get them out of the wall, which means they're going to be really well-preserved.
of mosquitoes that we were dealing with up there in the Arctic. And we walk along all sorts of places, wherever the permafrost is thawing, like these placer mining sites. This is, again, back in Dawson City.
The reflectivity is one of the feedbacks in the Arctic; release of methane as the permafrost thaws, another feedback.
So the aging question we explored and talked-- helped you think through this phenomenon of zombie cells At some point, way up in the north, enormous animals stomped down on the permafrost layers.
And what we're not adding to these risks are the big feedback loops, the melting of the permafrost , the methane hydrates in our oceans,
And they've been found in northern Russia, Siberia, in the permafrost .
Any chances it can offset the major negative feedback loops, like albedo loss from ice melting, decreasing, CO2 storage, permafrost melting releases,
The previous pictures were from the Taimyr Peninsula in North Central Siberia. This is, again, an active mining site, where you see them washing down the permafrost . And here are my folks kind of wandering around, waiting to pick up bones that are coming out as the dirt washes away.
And the fact that it's built into the side of a mountain, away from the Arctic Circle, means the permafrost of the mountain around it, that even if the grid goes down,
An example is Stephen Tindale in England who was head of Greenpeace UK and when he heard about the positive feedback of methane coming out of the melting permafrost he freaked out.
It seems to me that could have a pretty disastrous impact on the behavior of the atmosphere and I was wondering. Dr. Henry Pollack: The comment that, as the regions around the Arctic are thawing out, the permafrost degrading. And that, there's a lot of methane locked in the permafrost that's making its way to the atmosphere.
Most calculations of the diffusion of heat downward to melt the permafrost and release the methane, shows that it's not a fast problem. It's one that would progress slowly and have Dr. Henry Pollack: Well, the area that's been studied -- at least that I'm familiar with is, in fact, the Siberian permafrost . That's where these early measurements that