Not-So-Perma Frost

Daniel Fortier spends his summers studying the permafrost on Bylot Island, high in the eastern Canadian Arctic. While hiking there early in the 1999 field season, he distinctly heard the sound of running water yet saw no streams nearby. “I thought to myself, ‘Where is this sound coming from?’” says Fortier. “So, like a good researcher, I started to dig.”

Excavating the soil, known as permafrost because its temperature is below 0
Eventually, the surprising tunnel grew so wide that its roof caved in, creating a gully that erosion then widened, says Fortier, a geomorphologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. By the end of the summer, that gully was about 250 m long and 4 m wide. During the next 4 years, the network of underground tunnels at the site turned into a 750-m-long system of gullies that drained an area about the size of four soccer fields. Since then, Fortier and his colleagues have observed the same phenomenon at other sites on Bylot Island.

Several teams of scientists had previously described similar networks of gullies at various sites in the Arctic, but those highly eroded features had been deemed as much as several thousand years old. “No one had ever seen one of these things forming,” says Fortier. “We were in the right place at the right time.”

Researchers are observing many new phenomena in the Arctic—most of them related to the world’s changing climate. Globally, 11 of the 12 years from 1995 to 2006 are among the dozen warmest since the mid-1800s, scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last. Average temperatures worldwide have risen about 0.7