What is Permafrost?

Permafrost is any ground that remains completely frozen—32°F (0°C) or colder—for at least two years straight. These permanently frozen grounds are most common in regions with high mountains and in Earth’s higher latitudes—near the North and South Poles. And it covers large regions of the Earth.
And it covers 24% of the exposed land surface(is about 22.7 square kilometers) of the northern hemisphere.

How Does Permafrost Form?

A pool of underground water or puddle of water that freezes over the winter night, water that is trapped in sediment, soil, and the cracks, crevices, and pores of rocks turn to ice when ground temperatures drop below 32°F (0°C). And remain frozen for two consecutive years, it is called permafrost.

Where Is Permafrost Found?

It is found in areas where temperatures rarely rise above freezing. This means the permafrost is often found in Arctic regions such as Greenland, the U.S. state of Alaska, Russia, China, and Eastern Europe.

Ecological consequences:

In the northern circumpolar region, permafrost contains 1700 billion tons of organic material equaling almost half of all organic material in all soils. And the amount of carbon produced in permafrost by the global warming effect is four times the carbon that has been released to the atmosphere due to human activities in modern times.

One gram of soil from the active layer may include more than one billion bacteria cells.f placed along with each other, bacteria from one kilogram of active layer soil will form a 1000 km long chain. The number of bacteria in permafrost soil varies widely, typically from 1 to 1000 million per gram of soil.

Organism preserved in permafrost:

• Microbes, Scientists predict that up to 10²¹ microbes, including fungi and bacteria in addition to viruses, will be released from melting ice per year.
• Plants, silene stenophylla is revived from 30,000-year-old tissue found in an ice age squirrel burrow in the Siberian permafrost.
• Animals include a male steppe bison, a woolly rhinoceros, a mummified pony, and several mammoths.
• In 2018, a well-preserved bird was discovered by local fossil ivory hunters 30 km east of the village of Belaya Gora, Yakutia, in northeastern Siberia. The bird carcass was found approximately 150 meters (492 feet) into an ice tunnel that had been hydraulically mined into the permafrost at a depth of roughly 7 meters below the earth’s surface. So it was somewhat surprising (and quite exciting) when radiocarbon dating revealed that the lark died sometime between 44,163–48,752 years BP — in the middle of the last Ice Age.