Melting Permafrost, Rising Risks: POW Science Alliance member Jenny Watts on the Rapid Changes in the Arctic
Photos by Ming T. Poon
Jenny Watts says that when people learn that she works in the Arctic, they tell her they picture her on an all-white sheet of ice, a bleak frozen mass.
She tells them that’s not true at all. It’s actually one of the most complex, dynamic, ecologically sensitive landscapes on earth. It’s home to wildlife, and wildfowl as well as Indigenous communities who have been there for thousands of years. It’s made up of sea ice and tundra and boreal forests, mountains and glaciers and fjords.

It’s also one of the fastest-changing landscapes on earth. Arctic permafrost soils hold a huge amount of the planet’s soil carbon and nitrogen. Those northern landscapes are a significant sink for our global emissions—they’re currently helping our planet stay as cool as possible. But as the globe warms, that permafrost is becoming less permanently frozen. As it thaws, it’s changing the hydrology and the topography of the area, and it’s releasing those stored greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. This changes the way the region stores carbon, shifting the Arctic from a sink to a source of carbon emissions, which will have ramifications across the globe “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” Watts says.
Watts studies the ways those landscapes are changing, how climate change and human action are changing them, and what that means for the future.
The Arctic is a massive, hard-to-access place, it’s hard to get an understanding of the whole region from the ground, so Watts relies on big data to get a picture. She collects terabytes of open-access, publicly available, remote sensing data and puts it through a series of advanced methods in spatial and temporal statistics to get a detailed understanding of what’s happening in these high latitudes.“This is a really large region, with very limited field observation, and with remote sensing we can provide this level of detection,” she says.

In a recent paper, for Geophysical Research Letters, the findings of which she just presented at COP29, Watts and her team showed how they were able to quantify how much temperature, soil moisture, freeze timing and more are changing. Other scientists had looked at how the whole region, including ocean and ice, were changing, and that was the number people often looked at when they referenced the rate of the Arctic amplification, but Watts says there wasn’t scientific literature published on how the land itself was changing. Her team focused their modeling on the tundra and boreal forests to detect change over time and find hotspots where the ecosystem was changing fast.
They found warming air temperatures, decreases in permafrost, and increases in the annual non-frozen season. Vegetation was browning, there were fires in places they historically hadn’t happened, and as the permafrost melted, land collapsed, flooded and failed to drain.
“From an ecological perspective, these are the things that ultimately impact climate change,” she says.
She says it’s as if you had a lot of nice, organic vegetables in your freezer, and the freezer stopped working. Everything would get mushy and start to melt and stink. And, like in your freezer, as the Arctic thaws, microbes start decomposing the organic material, releasing greenhouse gasses like CO2 and methane. The warmer it gets, the more they release, and the more they release, the warmer it gets.
“Bad things are happening very quickly and it’s escalating,” Watts says.
She and her team found that while warming is happening across the Arctic, northern Alaska and Siberia are some of the places that are changing fastest. The impacts of that warming are both hyper-local and highly global.
“High latitudes are a reflection of what’s happening globally,” Watts says. “We know that global warming is impacting everything, but the Arctic is really interesting and kind of depressing. It’s been frozen for a long time, it holds more carbon than is currently in the atmosphere, and it’s warming more rapidly than anywhere else. We know that the change is being driven by anthropogenic effects of carbon and that it isn’t confined to the Arctic.”
Change in the Arctic is an international issue, which is creating a climatic feedback loom but it’s also a localized crisis.
Communities in the high latitudes, many of them indigenous communities who have historically been cut off from government assistance and resources, and who depend on frozen winters for transportation, sustenance and connectivity, are swiftly losing that lifeline. And with loss of solid permafrost, they’re dealing with the erosion and flooding of their villages in the summer, which wrecks property(a massive problem for people living largely in poverty and far away from, say Home Depot) and cuts off access. Now, they’re dealing with unprecedented fire, too.

“Tundra burns were rare in the past, now we’re seeing more intense dry periods and lightning strikes, which are also releasing more greenhouse gasses,” Watts says, enumerating just one of the problems in a warming Arctic. “It’s so dismal, their future is vanishing before their eyes. “The problem is so big, and it feels like there’s no hope. It’s a global issue, but they’re being left to fend for themselves.”
Watts says we need to address the coming crisis globally and locally. “We need to amplify the voices of people who are feeling the change firsthand and make it known,” she says. She says it’s imperative that we actively step in, like we do in the lower 48, for people living in the Arctic who are feeling the impacts of climate change “For instance, if a village burns down in Montana there are resources, there it’s less so,” she says.

She says she knows village elders who are making their way from the remote villages of the Arctic to advocate for themselves in D.C., but that it shouldn’t have to fall on their shoulders. “A lot of them feel like they need white advocates, it can’t just be them,” she says. Those communities that are struggling need sustainable ways to move forward.
And, big picture, to hold on to any kind of ecological and cultural integrity in the Arctic, we need to curb global greenhouse gas emissions. That will take governmental action and adherence to emissions reduction targets — part of why Watts was at COP—but she also says that a lot of change can come from the private sector. And as individuals, we can vote with our dollars, and influence companies and organizations. Every bit helps. What happens in the Arctic doesn’t just stay in the Arctic, and vice versa.
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Author: Heather Hansman
Heather Hansman is an award-winning environmental journalist who writes about the ways people, places, and recreation all influence each other. She’s the author of Powder Days: ski bums, ski towns, and the future of chasing snow, which looks at—among other things—how climate change impacts skiing. She thinks about the rest of the water cycle, too, she’s […]