ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, GJOHNSON2
About a two-hour drive south of Fairbanks, Alaska, near the northern tip of Denali National Park, stands a series of fences. In the winter, snow piles up behind each fence, creating drifts roughly a quarter-meter high. These drifts, which insulate the tundra soil by preventing the chilly winter air from stealing its heat, are part of an experiment interrogating how permafrost—soil that remains frozen even as snow melts in the tundra—might be affected by global warming.
If old carbon that has been locked up for hundreds or thousands of years is being respired, this will cause a long-term increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“Permafrost is one of the most unique kinds of soil,” says Neslihan Taş, an environmental microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “It contains more carbon than any other soil on Earth and twice as much carbon as ...
