Word: permafrost
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...Hultin took part in an expedition to Alaska to try to extract live virus from long-frozen victims of the 1918 flu in what is now Brevig Mission, Alaska. Now he was ready to try again. He knew from hard experience that no live virus had survived under the permafrost. But Taubenberger's paper convinced him that technology had advanced to the point where even a dead virus could be of immense value. The moment he saw the Science paper, he told himself, "There. This...
...year, contributing heavily to a noxious arctic haze that plagues residents of the northern latitudes as far away as Canada. Siberian industrial emissions contribute heavily to the threat of global warming, which in turn may come back to burn the region. Nearly two-thirds of the region lies atop permafrost. Climate models estimate that even a small temperature rise globally would be exaggerated in the north, and could melt the upper parts of the permafrost, turning huge areas of Siberia into mush and toppling the thousands of Soviet-era buildings erected on stilts sunk into the ice. The price...
...vast expanses contain natural oddities and wonders. In the far north, climate and physics conspire to defy common sense. Lakes wander up to 10 ft. a year as their waters accumulate summer heat and melt the edges of their permafrost boundaries. Summer melting of the upper layers of the permafrost also allows leaves frozen since the Pleistocene era to return to their slow-motion decay. For years scientists were puzzled by the age of methane gases released from arctic lakes, which radiocarbon dating revealed to be more than 10,000 years old. Mammoths that strode the earth in millenniums past...
...large amounts of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. These gases would act like a greenhouse, trapping the sun's heat. As the planet warmed, the polar caps would begin to melt, releasing water vapor and carbon dioxide into the Martian air, thickening it and increasing the greenhouse effect. Eventually the permafrost, where most of Mars' water is locked up, would melt, and rivers and lakes -- if not oceans -- would flow across the Red Planet again...
...caribou, musk-oxen, polar bears, golden eagles and wolves. For evidence to back their argument, the preservationists point to Prudhoe Bay. The weight of trucks atop temporary roads has cut into the mat of vegetation that makes up the tundra, allowing sunlight to weaken the top layer of permafrost beneath. The result: ever deepening ruts that erode into gullies. And oily wastes have leached out of supposedly secure dumps. The consequences of the contamination are unclear, but some scientists believe that since the permafrost confines biological activity to a layer of ^ earth just a couple of feet thick, and because...