Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change Read Free Page B

forest, we came to a house where the front yard showed clear signs of ice-wedge melt-off. The owner, trying to make the best of things, had turned the yard into a miniature-golf course. Around the corner, Romanovsky pointed out a house—no longer occupied—that basically had split in two; the main part was leaning to the right and the garage toward the left. The house had been built in the sixties or early seventies; it had survived until almost a decade ago, when the permafrost under it started to degrade. Romanovsky’s mother-in-law used to own two houses on the same block. He had urged her to sell them both. He pointed out one, now under new ownership; its roof had developed an ominous-looking ripple. (When Romanovsky went to buy his own house, he looked only in permafrost-free areas.)
    “Ten years ago, nobody cared about permafrost,” he told me. “Now everybody wants to know.” Measurements that Romanovsky and his colleagues at the University of Alaska have made around Fairbanks show that the temperature of the permafrost in many places has risen to the point where it is now less than one degree below freezing. In places where the permafrost has been disturbed, byroads or houses or lawns, much of it is already thawing. Romanovsky has also been monitoring the permafrost on the North Slope and has found that there, too, are regions where the permafrost is very nearly thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. While thermokarsts in the roadbeds and talik under the basement are the sort of problems that really only affect the people right near—or above—them, warming permafrost is significant in ways that go far beyond local real estate losses. For one thing, permafrost represents a unique record of long-term temperature trends. For another, it acts, in effect, as a repository for greenhouse gases. As the climate warms, there is a good chance that these gases will be released into the atmosphere, further contributing to global warming. Although the age of permafrost is difficult to determine, Romanovsky estimates that most of it in Alaska probably dates back to the beginning of the last glacial cycle. This means that if it thaws, it will be doing so for the first time in more than a hundred and twenty thousand years. “It’s really a very interesting time,” Romanovsky told me.
    The next morning, Romanovsky picked me up at seven. We were going to drive from Fairbanks nearly five hundred miles north to the town of Deadhorse, on Prudhoe Bay. Romanovsky makes the trip at least once a year, to collect data from the many electronic monitoring stations he has set up. Since the way was largely unpaved, he had rented a truck for the occasion. Its windshield was cracked in several places. When I suggested this could be a problem, Romanovsky assured me that it was “typical Alaska.” For provisions, he had brought along an oversize bag of Tostitos.
    The road that we traveled along—the Dalton Highway—had been built for Alaskan oil, and the pipeline followed it, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right. (Because of the permafrost, the pipeline runs mostly aboveground, on pilings that contain ammonia, which acts as a refrigerant). Trucks kept passing us, some with severed caribou heads strapped to their roofs, others belonging to the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company. The Alyeska trucks were painted with the disconcerting motto “Nobody Gets Hurt.” About two hours outside Fairbanks, we started to pass through tracts of forest that had recently burned, then tracts that were still smoldering, and, finally, tracts that were still, intermittently, in flames. The scene was part Dante, part Apocalypse Now . We crawled along through the smoke. After another few hours, we reached Coldfoot, named, supposedly, for some gold prospectors who arrived at the spot in 1900, then got “cold feet” and turned around. We stopped to have lunch at a truck stop, which made up pretty much the entire town. Just beyond Coldfoot, we passed the tree