Something Frozen for 15,000 Years Is Waking Up

This is the only perafrost tunnel in the world, which begs the question, what's perafrost? — So, perafrost by definition is any part of the subsurface that is permanently frozen for 2 years or more. — The dirt here has been frozen since the last ice age. When the army dug this tunnel, they didn't expect ground that collapses when it gets to room temperature. But they also probably didn't expect to have exposed frozen ground untouched for 50,000 years. In the northern hemisphere, about a fifth of the land is currently perafrost. — This whole area used to be flat and over time it's sublimated. — Sublimating is when ice skips over melting and goes directly from a solid to a gas, which is what dry ice does. So these walls are sublimating. There are priceless mammoth tusks poking out of the walls like they charged from the other side and got stuck. Like I said, this is ice age perafrost. This is one of those magical examples where scientists get clues like this to make pictures like this 40,000 years ago. Levi, are you seeing this? She's touching it. Our main goal in life here is to find a saber-tooth tiger. — And it's amazing seeing bones in person that have been extinct for thousands of years. But thawing perafrost is not just uncovering things that are dead. — Hold on. These are microbes that were frozen like 10 to 40 50,000 years ago. — Yep. — And they are still alive. — Yep. — What? — Absolutely. Still alive. — I didn't know, but scientists have known for a long time that bacteria can be preserved in ice for millennia. And as temperatures rise globally, perafrost will continue to thaw and we'll continue to get microbes waking up. It's just another side effect of rapidly changing temperatures in the Arctic. Scientists just found sink holes opening up at the bottom of the ocean, the size of skyscrapers, because I forgot to mention, but perafrost is found at the bottom of the ocean as well. Rising temperatures thaw perafrost which releases trapped carbon and that increases the amount of methane and CO2 in the atmosphere which in turn affects global temperatures.