Background Articles

The Arctic possesses frozen pathogens from past contagions, raising fears that climate change could unleash them as melting permafrost reveals the corpses of their victims.

Many communities in the Northwest Territories are worried about the impacts climate change is having on their cemeteries.

Alaska’s Arctic landscape is under assault from a warming climate, and it’s happening a lot faster than anticipated.

In Alaska, a new oil boom is on the horizon even as climate change arrives and greenhouse gas emissions climb.

In Alaska, a new oil boom is on the horizon even as climate change arrives and greenhouse gas emissions climb.

A growing number of Arctic underground cellars are being rendered unreliable as global warming and other modern factors force changes to an ancient way of life.

A recent report compiled by the Army Corps of Engineers and researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks documents erosion and other environmental threats facing communities in rural Alaska.

“Nobody knows how old it is. We do know that it’s disappearing.”

The combination of abundant rain and snowfall and extremely warm mean annual air temperatures may have led to the destabilization of permafrost around lake margins. Rapid snow melt and high amounts of excess meltwater further promoted rapid lateral breaching at lake shores and consequently sudden drainage of some of the largest lakes of the study region.

After kneeling in defrosted marine mammal goo ... doctors treated me for a seal finger infection," Peterson wrote. Seal finger is a bacterial infection that hunters contract from handling the body parts of seals. The only seals Peterson had handled were those in the log cabin. Those seals had been frozen in permafrost for decades.

This is not the first time the village of Chefornak has faced the threat of erosion and flooding, but relocating won’t be as easy as it was last time.

Sixty years ago, around the time when Matthew Rexford's father's father was turning the ground to build his own ice cellar as a proud whaling captain, there were 12 of these such cellars in Kaktovik. Today there is only one left.

Warming Arctic temperatures can create an environment friendly to bacterial infections like anthrax, an infection spread by contact with bacterial spores, which plant-eating animals may eat or breathe in while grazing.

While climate change is the primary driver of permafrost degradation in Arctic Alaska, a new analysis of 70 years of data reveals that tundra fires are accelerating that decline, contributing disproportionately to a phenomenon known as "thermokarst," the abrupt collapse of ice-rich permafrost as a result of thawing.

Scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences hypothesize that as the melting of the permafrost becomes more prevalent, so will the incidence of lung cancer.

With homes dilapidating, shores eroding and staircases falling off the houses, Point Lay residents are living through some of the most severe consequences of the warming climate in Alaska.

As atmospheric scientists, we found in a recent study that thawing permafrost contains lots of microscopic ice-nucleating particles. These particles make it easier for water droplets to freeze; and if the ones in permafrost get airborne, they could affect Arctic clouds.

In Yakutia, just a few meters separate summer from winter. There are places here where you can always build a snowman or taste fresh snowflakes.

New research shows that amplified global warming in the Canadian High Arctic drove a profound shift in the structure of a river network carved into a permafrost landscape in only 60 years. Researchers combined air photographs from 1959 with field observations and state-of-the-art Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data they collected in 2019 to understand how the Axel Heiberg Island landscape has evolved over a 60-year period

Most of Alaska sits atop permafrost. But the ground is thawing, leading to unexpected and sometimes catastrophic outcomes — what scientists have called a “slow disaster.”