SuppliedDuane Froese has been a professor at the University of Alberta in the department of Earth and atmospheric sciences for over 20 years. He has spent the last decade “focus[ing] on applied permafrost problems [and] the kind of impacts climate change has on permafrost in northern Canada.”
Froese is trying to better prepare northern regions for the consequences of climate change by working with communities and with northern governments.
Currently, the Permafrost ArChives Science Laboratory (PACS Lab), located at the U of A, is the only facility of its kind in the world. This poses problems for the future storage of the permafrost cores as the PACS freezers are “getting to be running over a bit.”
U of A’s PACS Lab analyses permafrost
Within the past decade that Froese has been researching permafrost, there have been many advances with technology and discoveries. Froese explained that “in the last few years, as the genetic side has really taken off, we know now that a gram of permafrost can have several billion fragments of DNA within it.”
This means that we can now get full genomes of animals from the sediment without having a fossil. However, as the permafrost thaws, this valuable evidence is lost. With only a gram of frozen sediment researchers are now able to reconstruct ecosystems of plants, animals, and microbes.
“If you have lots of little grams of sediment that were deposited over time, to be able to watch old ecosystems change together from the microbes to the large mammoths to plants, [it’s] really in the last three years that’s really come together,” Froese added.
Froese seeks to include Indigenous communities in research
The loss of ancient evidence is not the only consequence that comes with melting permafrost. As it begins to thaw, the permafrost releases carbon that has been stored for thousands of years. With a decrease in countries focusing on reducing their emissions, the carbon released from permafrost becomes an even greater challenge to combat.
Froese explained that it is projected to release enough carbon comparable to large industry countries as the thawing progresses.
Other than looking at the DNA fragments from animals, plants, and microbes, Froese’s research is mostly trying “to understand how much ice is in the permafrost, because the ice is what determines what happens when it thaws.”
But what happens when there is a lot of ice in the permafrost? Froese explained that once that ice melts in the permafrost, the soil collapses leading to complications for infrastructure. A lot of the work is focusing on “characterizing the properties of that material as a foundation, whether it’s a foundation for roads, communities, any of those kinds of things.”
Froese’s long term plans for the future of permafrost research includes working in partnership with the northern Indigenous communities to have them lead this research. This allows for these communities to be able to have an input on the research that is happening as well as voicing their concerns for the changes that they are seeing with the environment.
