// MIT TECH REVIEW — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
How to study a swiftly melting climate disaster
I helicoptered into the Alaskan wilderness with scientists on the frontlines of permafrost research.
Andrew Haverdink, a tall grad student in a rain bib and rubber boots, wrenched a double-handed drill from the frozen soil that underlies much of Alaska’s Denali National Park and then unclipped the hollow barrel from the end of the bit.
He knelt in front of a blue tarp, lined the barrel up with a plastic tray, and pushed a rod through the opposite end. A perfect solid, cylindrical core of ancient soil emerged—dark, rich permafrost at least a foot long.
On that late morning in early July, Haverdink was among a team of Northern Arizona University students and staff gathering samples and data from a research plot, divided by surveyor’s tape unspooled atop tussocks, alders, and fireweed.
In late June of 2013, a lightning strike sparked a fire in this stretch of mostly treeless tundra, in the northern backcountry of the park. Whipped by the Chinooks, intense downslope winds created as moist ocean air surmounts and then descends the Alaska Range, the fire ripped across nearly 35,000 acres. It burned through much of the vegetation and deep into the topsoil, stripping away the insulating layer that preserves the frozen permafrost, a massive storehouse of carbon that underlies 85% of Alaska.
During their first survey, in 2016, the researchers found that in places where the fire burned hottest and deepest, the thawed soil above the permafrost (known as the active layer) extended between a foot and nearly two feet deeper than in plots outside the burn scar—an indication of deep thawing.
Crucially, the fire also crossed two sets of survey grids that the National Park Service established in 2001, including the one where the researchers stood that morning. That pre-fire snapshot offered the Northern Arizona group a rare opportunity to study how the blaze has altered the vegetation, carbon, and permafrost across time, says Xanthe Walker, one of the principal investigators on the project, who was watching over Haverdink’s work that morning.
These direct observations from high-latitude fires are helping scientists to better understand the impacts of wildfire and permafrost loss on climate change, she says.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Walker says. “These are huge biomes with massive fires that no one’s ever been to or ever looked at.”
They’re among a growing group of researchers striving to untangle what happens in the aftermath of fires in the Arctic-boreal region as they occur more often, burn hotter than before, and expose the landscape and frozen permafrost to a warming climate.