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 E-Mail IMAGE: Researchers from the US and Canada found evidence in mineral deposits from caves in Canada that permafrost thawing took place as recently as 400,000 years ago, in temperatures not much... view more  Credit: Jeremy Shakun, Boston College Chestnut Hill, Mass. (4/28/2021) -- The vast frozen terrain of Arctic permafrost thawed several times in North America within the past 1 million years when the worlds climate was not much warmer than today, researchers from the United St...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nearly one quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere, amounting to some 9 million square miles, is layered with permafrost – soil, sediment, and rocks that are frozen solid for years at a time. Vast stretches of permafrost can be found in Alaska, Siberia, and the Canadian Arctic, where persistently freezing temperatures have kept carbon, in the form of decayed bits of plants and animals, locked in the ground. Scientists estimate that more than 1,400 ...

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