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[Music rises] Sturm: What we're looking at is a lecacy of the ice age.

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Permafrost and methane

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is a time machine.

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So what we’re going to do is walk back in time. We’re gonna see old carbon, 

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old bones, old environments.

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And none of those are in equilibrium with today’s climate so that’s the problem. 

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That world doesn’t exist anymore and it hasn’t for 10,000 years. 

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 It was nicely and very delicately

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separated from this modern warmer climate by about 

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this much moss. And when that moss goes away 

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whether through fire or for human disturbance 

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or for warming, then all hell breaks loose. 

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[lively opening credit music]

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[music fades]

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Narrator: Permafrost – it’s maybe the part of the cryosphere that’s most out of sight

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… and mind. It’s fascinating how it formed in the first place, 

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and how it got loaded with so much carbon. 

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In a minute, we’ll go back underground with Matthew Sturm from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

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But first let’s meet Peter Griffith,

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NASA’s project manager for the ABoVE Campaign, which supports more than

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70 science projects studying changing forests and tundra vegetation, 

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wild fires, animals like birds, caribou, 

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and Dall sheep, methane emissions from expanding northern lakes, 

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and the impacts of climate change on people in Alaska, Canada

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… and around the world. Many of those projects have some direct

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connection to the permafrost. Griffith: Permafrost is the

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hidden cryosphere. It’s the permanently frozen soil 

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that surrounds the Arctic. All across Alaska and northern Canada and then 

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across Eurasia, the ground has been frozen 

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during the Ice Ages.

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Narrator: During the ice ages, there was not enough snowfall in the drier regions of Alaska and Canada 

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to form glaciers there, so the land was suitable for vegetation.

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Griffith: What happened is that over thousands and thousands of years, all of that 

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plant material got compacted and frozen every winter and buried 

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and pushed down, so that today, there’s 300 feet deep 

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of frozen water and dead plants and

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some pieces of dead animals, too. Sometimes, you’d find 

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woolly mammoths in the permafrost. But most of it, 

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of the organic matter as we call it in the permafrost

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is frozen plant material.

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Narrator: Some of that plant material is now thawing and decaying, releasing its ancient

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carbon into the atmosphere, sometimes in the form of methane gas

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bubbling out of expanding northern lakes. 

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Griffith: We started this field campaign because 

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the Arctic is the part of the planet that is warming first and fastest 

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and there are consequences to this for permafrost.

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During the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, we’re studying permafrost 

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with people on the ground, from aircraft flying 

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over the region, and also from satellites in space. 

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Narrator: Another way to understand the permafrost is take a walk 

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below ground with Matthew Sturm, and into the 

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U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permafrost tunnel.

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Griffith: And they’ve dug this tunnel back into the side of a hill about 200 feet.

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And it goes sort of sloping down,

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so that by the end of the tunnel, you’re about 100 feet underground. 

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And you’re surrounded by bones sticking out of the wall 

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 from the steppe bison and the mastodons

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that are frozen in it. There’s sticks that are 40,000 years old 

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you know, that you can touch with your hand. There’s grass that’s still green

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that’s tens of thousands of years because it got frozen 

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right away and it’s never lost the green color.

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Narrator: But as fascinating as it is to see these relics of an ancient era, 

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or to see a tree split in half by thawing soil, 

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or even to light a ball of methane on fire from under winter ice … 

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at the end of the day Peter and his colleagues want to know just how much organic matter

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is frozen in that permafrost, and how fast it might be released.

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Griffith: Currently we think that there is

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something on the order of two to three times 

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as much carbon locked up as 

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frozen organic matter and permafrost, as there is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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So, releasing 

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all of that organic carbon from permafrost into the atmosphere, 

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would be a real game-changer. That would be a tremendous 

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transformation of the planet’s atmosphere. Now, the good news 

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is that it would take a very, very long time for that to happen. 

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However, we are warming the planet 

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at a rate now that calls in to question, how quickly

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is that changing, and what the consequences 

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in the near future and in the far future are going to be. 

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[Music, sounds of a crowd chatting]

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Neumann: You're in a field, somewhere in California at four in the morning. 

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It's sort of surreal in a way. Because, you've put so much time into it for 

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so long, and actually seeing it over there is like ... [laughs]

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Whoa, you know! It's a, it's a big deal.