The first time geneticist George Church visited Siberia was the first summer the permafrost melted.
Permafrost by its nature is supposed to stay frozen year-round, but in a marker of encroaching climate change, in 2018 the top layer of soil thawed and didn’t refreeze. Microbes began to eat the carbon that had been locked away in the ice and released it into the air as methane gas. Church watched a teammate light a match and ignite a pocket of the gas that hovered over the softening bog they stood in.
