What can be done to avoid man-made accidents and emergencies? According to Vostokgosplan experts, the use of special thermal stabilizers will help ensure the stability of the Arctic infrastructure.

A fisherman was coming home from fishing last night and noticed (what he thought was) a coffin sticking out of the old gravesite above one of the markers I used to measure erosion with last summer. It turned out to not be a coffin, but rather an old air duct or metal meat trailer.

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.

I'm guessing all the rain we received during summer of 2021 created the trench.

"The sea level rise and wind is making this happen because it is really vulnerable. We are always really amazed every time we go out there with the change, and pieces of earth the size of a house falling over."

Thawing permafrost and erosion is resulting in the loss of infrastructure in Newtok. These images show impacts on utility poles, and the shoreline.

The church is no outlier — several buildings in the community are affected by freeze-thaw cycle of permafrost. Even an iconic church is not immune from changing permafrost.

Wildfires on permafrost are ravaging Yakutia - or the Sakha Republic - the largest and coldest entity of the Russian Federation. The scale is mesmerizing. There are some 300 separate fires, now covering 12,140 square kilometers - but only around half of these are being tackled, because they pose a threat to people. The rest are burning unchecked.

Kwigillingok, a community on the Bering Sea coast of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, is used to some flooding during high tides. But in recent years, that flooding has grown more severe, reaching a new threshold last week.

A microscopic organism has wriggled back to life and reproduced asexually after lying frozen in the vast permafrost lands of northeastern Siberia for 24,000 years. Russian scientists found the tiny, ancient animal called the bdelloid rotifer in soil taken from the Alazeya River basin, in the far north of Russia’s Yakutia region.

The heat wave sweeping through the N.W.T. and Yukon will have a major impact on permafrost thaw in both territories, experts warn. 

Multiple buildings and homes, including the Point Lay clinic, were without water. The water main break was a result of the water main sinking down further into the permafrost.

“The big finding was that we really have something that’s coming out from a deep pool,” said Steinbach. As the permafrost thaws, it opens up new pathways that allow methane to pass through.

This research provides a scientific reference for the design, construction, operation and maintenance of engineering facilities in the permafrost region of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Arctic permafrost is degrading much faster than expected, warn scientists from the extreme north of Yakutia. It took two years for a building in the port town of Chersky on the Kolyma River, to snap in the middle after the once solid permafrost could no longer hold its supporting foundation.

Abnormally warm winters in 2018 and 2019, in which the ground did not freeze solid enough to support heavy equipment, delayed completion of this project.

In Chefornak, a family was forced to evacuate their home because a sinkhole caused by thawing permafrost formed underneath it. That family had to move into a building intended to be a quarantine facility.

The frozen carcass is 80 per cent intact and may be around 34,000 years old. Two extinct cave lion cubs were also found here in the Abyisky district of Yakutia last year close to a tributary of the remote Tirekhtyakh River.

Underground, a mighty giant is disintegrating: the permafrost is about to drop its roof. Constantly creeping upwards, the permafrost zone is now 100 meters further up the mountainside than 20 years ago.

At Longyearbyen airport, the peak temperature reached 9.2 °C for a short period, nearly two degrees warmer than the last November record measured in 1975.