Siberia is a pretty popular place lately. It was already in the news last week because temperatures rose to record highs. This week a different disaster took place there, a major oil spill.
For decades, the Inuit woman, a victim of the 1918 Spanish flu, lay buried in a mass grave under six feet of Alaskan permafrost. But when the frozen ground began to thaw in the 1990s, the Inuit town of Brevig Mission gave scientists permission to dig her up. Her ample body fat kept her lungs insulated against warmer temperatures, helping to preserve the fragments of the virus that lay within.
A new study shows that the abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost will double previous estimates of potential carbon emissions — carbon that was once frozen in the permafrost ice. In fact, it is already changing the landscape and ecology of the circumpolar north.
Tokyo Electric Power Company started building something new and very cold at the ruined Fukushima nuclear power plant complex on Monday. It’s basically a big underground cooler meant to freeze the soil into a rectangular wall around TEPCO’s four nonfunctioning but still highly radioactive reactors. The frozen ground of the … [continued]
