After 15,000 years, it's waking up

wow i didn't even think about things that might be living in this tunnel oh yeah we're gonna smell them but levi are you seeing this there's a tunnel 60 feet underground in a frozen alaskan hillside the u.s government dug this tunnel 60 years ago and to this day access is tightly controlled as a physics student at mit i never not once learned about permafrost and yet after visiting this tunnel i would argue it's one of the most important areas of research on the planet because what happens to permafrost is going to affect all of us hey i'm diana you're watching physics girl and i'm going to take you inside thanks to kiwi co for sponsoring today's video more about them later yeah this is the the coldest morning we had here i know it's kind of cold this morning so we're in a little place called fox alaska it's um also called kind of the gateway to the arctic dog life goes hand in hand with living in alaska and dog is like bed dog is life yeah we're switching parkas out and then yep and we got to put on a hard hat just in case all right good to go sometimes there's a fan on sometimes there's not oh good for now there's not so we can kind of start up here you'll smell like oh wow yeah wow that is stinky it's a little bit like manure but not in a bad way in a bad way a week after we got home i randomly texted levi the tunnel smells like dog poop that's what the smell is it suddenly occurred to me because i was unpacking and the wool long underwear that you have to wear in alaskan winters still reek to like the tunnel levi didn't text me back it looks alien somehow i know i love it this is the only one in the world this is the only permafrost tunnel in the world which begs the question permafrost so permafrost by definition is any part of the subsurface that is permanently frozen for two years or more okay so every floor in this tunnel every wall all the soil the rocks roots plants everywhere you look is like a permanent freezer and in fact the dirt here has been frozen since the last ice age more on that in a bit but first i want to explore how this cold war tunnel became an urgent research lab how permafrost is related to a mysterious anthrax outbreak in russia how a local house collapsing nearby is connected to all this and why billionaires are throwing millions at permafrost science if none of that piques your interest and you were just looking for a video about frozen dirt well you found the right video too so firstly why did the us military dig a tunnel that doesn't lead anywhere and why are people rarely allowed inside the permafrost tunnel was excavated in 1963 and it was actually a cold war project the u.s army wanted to figure out if permafrost would be kind of an insulator for army equipment about a year later they decided it was in fact not a very good the more stuff you put in here the more people the more bodies it tends to heat up and there was actually a little bit of a cave-in way back when 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 pristine frozen ground untouched for 50 000 years ground that is perfect for research pretty soon after they handed it over to us so we've been doing research for probably about 30 40 years yeah amazing seems like a pretty specific thing to study we didn't have permafrost in hawaii well i had no idea but in the northern hemisphere about a fifth of the land is currently permafrost permafrost is found in arctic and suburbic regimes it's in canada russia greenland nordic countries antarctica and it goes deep like 30 feet 100 feet no dude over 2 000 feet in alaska permafrost is everywhere and so the army dug this tunnel and then they passed it over for research and access is tightly controlled because you know the tunnel is technically a mine but also because everything in here is fragile even the walls you could bring a hair dryer in and do some serious damage you know how when you put ice in a freezer and it shrinks over time does that happen it does here it does this whole area used to be flat oh wow 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 ice does in your freezer and what dry ice does so these walls are sublimating and we find that there's actually different sublimation rates for soil versus ice you can see where the dirt is sticking out further than the ice it actually has to be cooled now in the summer with giant refrigerators not to mention 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 permafrost before we get to the mammoth tusks a quick message thanks to kiwico for sponsoring today's video kiwi co makes super cool hands-on projects and activities designed to expose kids to concepts in steam most people know me as a scientist but growing up i spent most of my time making stuff doing arts and crafts and when they overlapped with science those were my favorite those are the kinds of activities that kiwi co provides with their crates kiwi co is defining the future of play by making it engaging enriching and seriously fun clearly i was the kid who tried to get as far as i could without instructions and then gave in when i knew i was about to make a mistake i couldn't recover from each monthly crate is designed by experts and tested by kids and over 1 000 hours goes into developing every single crate because the crates are convenient and include everything you need they're a great resource for learning at home there's detailed kid-friendly instructions and an educational magazine filled with content to learn even more about the crate's theme kiwico crates cover a wide variety of topics from month to month so you always learn something new visit kiwico.com physicsgirl30 to get 30 off of your first month of any subscription and now back to the mammoth tusks this is a really interesting part of the tunnel we call it the bone yard this is part of a mammoth test they are not considered fossils actually they are too young so these are the actual bones then these are the original bones perfectly preserved in permafrost this is one of those magical examples where scientists are actual detectives and get clues like this to make pictures like this most of our tunnel we're in the late pleistocene 40 000 years ago levi are you seeing this oh she's touching it our main goal in life here is to find a saber-toothed tiger so i get why the military has locked this up and it's amazing seeing bones in person that have been extinct for thousands of years but thawing permafrost is not just uncovering things that are dead what we're smelling is actually microbes that are awakening and they're actually starting to munch on carbon what does awakening mean not that i was worried were you worried all right so right now we're about 10 000 years old when we get to the end we'll be about 40 50 000 years old wow so the smell actually changes a little bit depending on which microbes we're smelling 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 so i didn't know but scientists have known for a long time that bacteria can be preserved in ice for millennia is there anything to worry about about like zombie bacteria so there potentially could be so the majority of the microbes that we have measured in the tunnel are non-toxic are not a threat they're just your normal average microbes that you know are living on your body they just happen to be very old there is the potential for some pathogens to be released we have not found any here in the permafrost tunnel okay well good to know meanwhile in 2016 a crazy thing happened in a remote village of siberia dozens of nomadic people there became mysteriously ill and thousands of reindeer began to pass away the government soon realized they'd contracted anthrax so families were airlifted out of the area officials didn't know exactly how the outbreak started though because anthrax hadn't been seen in that area for decades anthrax is a pathogen and it can survive freezing temperatures so the leading hypothesis for what started the outbreak is bizarre rising temperatures thawed the permafrost and along with it a reindeer carcass that had been infected with anthrax decades ago and as temperatures rise globally permafrost will continue to thaw and will continue to get microbes waking up chances are they won't be dangerous but it's just another side effect of rapidly changing temperatures in the arctic so this is actually sort of a buried pond 15 000 year old pond twigs the main character of this story is not the ancient anthrax waking up and it's not the mammoth tusks it's literally h2o you forget that these walls can be to 90 water is there anything structurally risky about this sort of wall opening up not really so the sublimation in here isn't a problem but permafrost all over the world is withering away for a different reason and it is a problem because it's actually thawing there's a house nearby in fairbanks alaska collapsing in the middle out of nowhere because of the falling this is our biggest ice wedge these parts of the wall that look alien are what scientists are particularly interested in if this were to thaw you would basically form a pretty large pond or a small lake here's a great example of thaw stable versus what's not going to be stable it just turns into mud which would you rather build your house on maybe this one's the prettiest one in ice wedge forms when it's really really really cold like negative 40 degrees celsius negative 50. the ground actually cracks just a little bit when it cracks we get little tiny bits of water that can seep in it'll re-freeze it'll refreeze and then crack will tend to form along that same area exactly so the main attraction of the tunnel is all of its ice features the history that they hold and the future that they will bring if they thaw over time if you look at this massive ice wedge that's about 40 000 years old this is a wonderful example of why permafrost degradation would be really bad for infrastructure if this were to thaw you very well could see an entire building swallowed into a sinkhole you would see the roads start to get really bumpy and crack in alaska there's a lot of whole villages that are being sort of sucked into the ground news of dozens of sinkholes and exploding craters opening up all over siberia is related to thawing permafrost so you get these trees that were once straight up they're starting to cave in on themselves yeah drunken forest scientists just found sinkholes opening up at the bottom of the ocean the size of skyscrapers because i forgot to mention but permafrost is found at the bottom of the ocean as well seeing quite a bit of permafrost degradation just over the time scale of a few years okay so permafrost thaws the landscape warps even on the stable permafrost you're still gonna have just natural ground shifting just because there's so much water alaska is literally changing elevation due to thawing permafrost so figuring out what's going to happen to permafrost as the planet warms is incredibly important and people are starting to pay attention the billion dollar industry now for repairing infrastructure related to sawing permafrost some well-known donors are pledging 41 million dollars to study the greenhouse gas emissions just from melting permafrost and we've done massive massive excavation the past few years we've like quadrupled the size so what research are they doing here so this is a great kind of test bed proxy for ancient times right we can compare to what was going on 20 to 50 000 years ago it's a really great comparison tool for what's going on in the surface now because what we're seeing on the surface is just rapid change so scientists are using the permafrost tunnel to figure out what's going to happen to permafrost all over the planet everyone that deals with permafrost always has to talk about carbon the soils in the arctic just really naturally have a high amount of carbon that's kind of perfectly preserved literally plants and roots rising temperatures thaw permafrost which releases trapped carbon and that increases the amount of methane and co2 in the atmosphere which in turn affects global temperatures it's a positive feedback cycle yeah so we want to know what's going to happen to that carbon but not only is permafrost degradation affecting carbon it's affecting our global water our food supply and weirdly the future of travel we're seeing a lot of test case scenarios where vehicles snow machine things like that are being sucked into rivers because we now can't really fully predict when rivers are going to freeze and thaw i think it's sometimes a bit of a mystery to people outside of science how scientists go about finding answers to their questions so i asked amanda to explain how she does her research and what the impact of that research is literally it's us with like a little backpack with something behind us and we're like walking around so we'll use electrical resistivity tomography ground penetrating radar and we are making a 3d map of what's thawed and what's frozen then we would go in and collect soil cores i'm fully covered in mud in a tyvek suit i'm in there what exactly are you looking for so the soil freezes in the arctic from the top down there's the upper portion of the soil column that portion of the soil freezes and thaws every year and then a solid frozen barrier and this is what happens at that transition zone this is what's called segregation ice these transition zones tell us about what was going on 20 000 years ago on the surface which is more kind of what i study those are present time transition zones and you can imagine there's at that interface that's thawed but you have this freezing front so you have basically kind of acidic pore waters from the watershed that are pushed deeper and hit this iron layer so what we're seeing is late september early october is just this amazing time for this mass flush of redox active elements into watersheds melting permafrost is not just affecting elevation changes and shifting landscapes it's affecting co2 levels in the atmosphere and unexpected things like the amount of iron in your water what does that mean for people when you flood these reactive metals into the watershed you've now changed a lot of different characteristics one being when that water is going to freeze imagine a tank that's now going over a river that's supposed to be frozen it's gonna change how we're predicting when we should travel other impacts like microbial content also carbon whether we're releasing more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or actually sequestering carbon it's going to change what plants are able to survive there we can test our tools here figure out if they work and then take them to places where there's rapid change going on and figure out how much unfrozen water we're seeing so i came into the permafrost tunnel thinking i was gonna see some mammoth tusks i came in thinking i was gonna learn a little bit about how scientists do research on ice in the ground i did not realize how big of an impact permafrost will have to daily life and we'll have to the future of our planet plus some of the research going on here is just cool like the mammoth bones and nasa comes in here and it's incredible to me that this is the only place where scientists can do this depth of research because it's the only permafrost tunnel in the world it was incredible to be there heartening to see the hard work scientists are doing and of course our time in alaska was pretty cool too thank you so much for watching and happy physicsing [Music] you

Channel: Physics Girl

Views: 2,641,543

Keywords: physics girl, dianna cowern

Id: VMJPHqwv41U

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 30 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/DamnInteresting]

See also: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-city-under-ice/