Permafrost is the frozen mix of soil, ice, and rocks that occupies nearly a quarter of the land in the northern hemisphere.

Permafrost and ice wedges have built up over millennia in the Arctic. When they thaw, they destabilize the surrounding landscape. Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images Across ...

The dramatic shift is a warning sign—and scientists say the changes that aren't yet visible to the naked eye are just as ...

In the Arctic tundra of Alaska, climate change is forcing an Alaska Native village to relocate. Rising temperatures are melting the underground permafrost. The melted ice then mixes with the soil, ...

Millions of cubic meters of methane are trapped beneath Svalbard's permafrost, and researchers have recently learne d that it can migrate through the cold seal of the permafrost and escape into the ...

Permafrost thaw can stimulate the release of soil carbon, triggering a positive carbon-climate feedback that may be mediated ...

Fossil fuel companies drilling into the Norwegian permafrost may be unleashing a hidden monster. After analyzing 18 hydrocarbon exploration wells in Svalbard, an archipelago located between Norway and ...

Permafrost soils store large quantities of organic carbon and are often portrayed as a critical tipping element in the Earth system, which, once global warming has reached a certain level, suddenly ...

Across the northern reaches of our planet, things are so cold that nearly 9 million square miles (23 million square kilometers) of earth remain frozen solid year-round. But that’s changing as the ...

Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, ...

Melting permafrost will release strange microbes into the atmosphere in coming years, scientists believe. They fear that ancient microbes, suspended in natural time capsules of permafrost, sometimes ...