Financial support for ScienceDaily comes from advertisements and referral programs, where indicated. Tim Smedley is a sustainability writer, based in the UK. Now that the ice is melting, this dead organic material is starting to rot, releasing methane and CO2. The fate of the Arctic is not a foregone conclusion: The actions taken by the international community will have a substantial impact on just how much carbon will be released and how much of the permafrost will thaw. They found that during the cold glacial periods, the deepest water was significantly denser than it is today. Co-researcher Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw from Cardiff University added: "The new sensor technologies that we used give us a window into this previously unseen part of the glacial environment. The remainder comes from fossil fuels like natural gas. D. G. Barber, J. K. Ehn, M. Puko, S. Rysgaard, J. W. Deming, J. S. Bowman, T. Papakyriakou, R. J. Galley, D. H. Sgaard. This site needs JavaScript to work properly. When they settle into a solid they form a lattice that is less dense than the liquid state. I wish to receive a weekly Cambridge research news summary by email. Scientists believed that a decrease in the density of this deep water resulted in the release of CO2 from the deep ocean to the atmosphere. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily, its staff, its contributors, or its partners. There may be an effect for our winters too: "Winter weather could become more easterly cold and snowy as the ice declines," Mr Scaife said. Like we did in Greenland, it's time to put more robust numbers on the theory. White ice reflects more sunlight than. Fire is a chemical reaction that involves the combination of fuel and oxygen. The ultra-slow release of reactants was successfully achieved. Quantification of Active Site Density and Turnover Frequency: From Single-Atom Metal to Nanoparticle Electrocatalysts. When a young boy and 2,500 reindeer died, the disease was identified: anthrax. How is melting of ice is a physical change short answer? These ice ages are punctuated by "interglacial" periods where temperatures rise to around current levels. 2021 Apr 13;1(5):586-597. doi: 10.1021/jacsau.1c00074. . Lead author, Guillaume Lamarche-Gagnon, from Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences, said: "What is also striking is the fact that we've found unequivocal evidence of a widespread subglacial microbial system. Therefore smaller quantities have the potential to cause disproportionate impacts on atmospheric temperatures. 2017 Oct 17;50(10):2539-2555. doi: 10.1021/acs.accounts.7b00300. And we do have some control of that. Our emissions cannot remain business as usual. does melting ice release oxygen The Northern Hemisphere winter of 2018/2019 was dominated by headlines of the polar vortex, as temperatures plummeted unusually far south into North America. The surface of a terrestrial ice sheet would have been very similar on a primitive Earth that lacked an oxygen-rich atmosphere and a protective ozone layer. Riddle Solved: Why Was Roman Concrete So Durable? In the summer of 2016, a group of nomadic reindeer herders began falling sick from a mysterious illness. It suggests a massive reorganisation of ocean temperature and salinity, but finds that this was not the driver of increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As reported in Nature, using novel sensors to measure methane in meltwater runoff in real time, they observed that methane was continuously exported from beneath the ice. If the meltwater remains close to its source (by being trapped in a glacier lake, for example), then there is no net movement of mass away from the glacier or ice sheet, and Earth's rotation won't change. 2020 Nov 26;10(70):43109-43116. doi: 10.1039/d0ra06988d. So as you gather it into a storage locker, you can end up with a giant flood of water as your 20,000 kg of Ice filling a storage locker decides it's ready to melt all at once. Like a bottle of wine with a cork, sea ice can prevent CO2-rich water from releasing its CO2 to the atmosphere. a. compared to climate changes due to plate tectonics and astronomical causes, the changes due to volcanic eruptions are: a) very short. S2 ep4: What would a more just future look like? To unlock the information inside an ice core, researchers in the lab may melt or crush the sample bit by bit; each deeper layer represents a slightly earlier time in the Earth's climate history. Do you know this baby? Iced photochemical reduction to synthesize atomically dispersed metals by suppressing nanocrystal growth. Prof Wadhams calculates this absorption of the sun's rays is having an effect "the equivalent of about 20 years of additional CO2 being added by man". Street fighting in Bakhmut but Russia not in control, Inside the enclave surrounded by pro-Russia forces, China looks at reforms to deepen Xi's control, 'The nurses wanted me to feel guilty about my abortion, From Afghan TV fame to a US factory floor. In many places, less than 10 percent of the Arctic surface is water, noted Smith. At the surface, the exposed soil carbon then absorbs sunlight, which breaks it down into compounds easily respired as carbon dioxide by bacteria. Does melting ice release oxygen? ScienceDaily. During this formation CO2 splits off and is dissolved in a heavy cold brine, which gets squeezed out of the ice and sinks into the deeper parts of the ocean. Disclaimer. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Alongside Pleistocene fossils are massive carbon and methane emissions, toxic mercury, and ancient diseases. One paper co-authored by Hanne Christiansen, professor and vice dean of education at University Centre Svalbard, Norway, studied permafrost temperatures at a depth of 20 metres (that's 65ft, far enough down not to be affected by short-term seasonal changes) and found temperatures had risen by up to 0.7C since 2000. Could a greener Arctic start to see more trees and vegetation take root, sequestering more carbon and offering new grazing land for animals? www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500. The collapses of Arctic soil, also known as thermokarst failures, are at the root of the process. Once they had those enzymes, cells could evolve oxygen-based photosynthesis, which is more efficient than its anaerobic form. Take your model of the South Pole and carefully add around cup of water around the sides of the dough, so that the water level comes up about one-third to half of the way up the dough mound. And land ice melt does raise sea levels. In its pure state, water freezes at 0 . University of Bristol. Like layers of snow, the shells of these tiny animals, known as foraminifera, contain clues about what the ocean was like while they were alive, allowing the researchers to reconstruct how the ocean changed as the ice age was ending. Melting of a given mass of a solid requires the addition of a characteristic amount of heat, the heat of fusion. 2019 Feb 5;10(1):606. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-08484-8. The Southern Ocean is a key area of exchange of CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere. The ice density will increase from . An ice-melting process can be used to synthesize atomically dispersed metals, including cobalt, nickel, copper, rhodium, ruthenium, palladium, silver, osmium, iridium, platinum, and gold, which can be easily extended to other solution syntheses (such as precipitation, hydrolysis . When is Eurovision and how do you get tickets? Epub 2011 Nov 14. Content on this website is for information only. As the Arctic summers are getting warmer we may see an acceleration of global warming, because reduced sea ice in the Arctic will remove less CO2 from the atmosphere, Danish scientists report. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world (in part due to the loss of solar reflectivity). of salt over the ice cubes in one bowl, as shown in Figure 3, below. Melting of white Arctic ice, currently at its lowest level in recent history, is causing more absorption. al. It promptly came back to life, 300 centuries later. Step 3: Heat 0 C water to 100 C water. How does ice change to steam? S. Rysgaard, D. H. Sgaard, M. Cooper, M. Pućko, K. Lennert, T. N. Papakyriakou, F. Wang, N. X. Geilfus, R. N. Glud, J. Ehn, D. F. McGinnis, K. Attard, J. Sievers, J. W. Deming, D. Barber. Then large amounts of rain came the precipitation here is typically snow we had mudslides crossing roads for 100s of metres we had to evacuate some parts of the population., The melting permafrost is transforming Alaska's landscapes (Credit: Alamy). Sunlight and bacteria at work In 1980, the Arctic ice in summer made up some 2% of the Earth's surface. This is due to the ions that make up salt that are attracted to the oppositely charged oxygen and . An official website of the United States government. But it was only through doing our study, and looking at the change in both density and CO2 across the deglaciation, that we found they actually werent linked. In the melting process the water molecules actually absorb energy. Melting ice absorb energy. This is referred to as the methane bomb. If you want to melt ice cubes faster, you have to lower the ice's freezing point - make it melt into a liquid at a lower temperature than normal. The ocean is made up of different layers of varying densities and chemical compositions. They are now randomly arranged and can move freely in all directions. For example, as the Arctic warms, tundra and boreal forests can release large amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, leading to further warming. Wei H, Wu H, Huang K, Ge B, Ma J, Lang J, Zu D, Lei M, Yao Y, Guo W, Wu H. Chem Sci. By Posted browning 725 pro sporting canada In tennis necklace swarovski Please enable it to take advantage of the complete set of features! Thank you for taking time to provide your feedback to the editors. eCollection 2019 Jun 21. A new study of how the structure of the ocean has changed since the end of the last ice age suggest that the melting of a vast lid of sea ice caused the release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This bowl will only contain an ice cube. The solid ice particles absorb heat energy from the warmer air, giving the particles energy and enabling them to move away from one another. Fire can't melt everything, but it can melt steel which has a melting point of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Opinions vary on the date of the demise of summer sea ice. First crystals of calcium carbonate are formed in sea ice in winter. The evolution of efficient, oxygen-based photosynthesis has been hard to explain. Oxygenic photosynthesis, which involves freeing electrons from water to produce oxygen, requires more energy. Place an ice cube in each bowl. Read about our approach to external linking. Ice is generally encountered in biomes with starting temperatures well below the freezing point of pure water. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. But then another greenhouse gas - methane, currently trapped in the Arctic permafrost - could be released with warming and make matters worse. It's well established that, in the years to come, increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air will cause the climate to change, thereby leading to the ice caps melting at an accelerated rate . Method 1: Use a cooler. The information you enter will appear in your e-mail message and is not retained by Phys.org in any form. Dorte Haubjerg Sgaard has just completed her studies of sea ice in Greenland. Answer: Melting ice is a physical change since it simply involves a change in the physical state of water, from ice to water in the liquid state. That deep carbon is unlikely to be influenced by the same sunlight conversion process caused by thermokarst failures, he said. While some methane had been detected previously in Greenland ice cores and in an Antarctic Subglacial Lake, this is the first time that meltwaters produced in spring and summer in large ice sheet catchments have been reported to continuously flush out methane from the ice sheet bed to the atmosphere. The study demonstrates another feedback caused by warming -- high. As the Arctic summers are getting. Professor Wadhams stresses that there are uncertainties - cloud cover over the Arctic could change and help reflect back some of the sun's radiation. Permafrost is almost the perfect storm you have a lot of mercury in permafrost, it is released into wetland systems, those are the right environment for organisms to take them up, and then [it] heads up the food web. Although conditions at the end of the last ice age were very different to today, this study highlights the importance that dynamic features such as sea ice have on regulating the climate system, and emphasises the need for improved understanding and prediction as we head into our ever warming world, said Roberts. One new paper 1, which states there has been less surface melting recently than in past years, has been cited as "proof" that there's no global warming.Other evidence that the amount of sea ice around Antarctica seems to be increasing slightly 2-4 is being used in the same . but yeah thermo plates are your best bet. . If his calculations are correct then that means that over recent decades the melting of the Arctic ice cap has put as much heat into the system as all the CO2 we have generated in that time. What's the least amount of exercise we can get away with? d) reduce the solar energy at earth's surface. But we also thought that this did not apply to ocean areas covered by ice, because the ice was considered impenetrable. Join more than one million Future fans by liking us onFacebook, or follow us onTwitterorInstagram. At the same time, he said, the biggest fears about a ticking climate bomb in the Arctic lie around stored carbon that is very deep underground, out of the reach of many surface waters. In summer, when the sea ice melts, calcium carbonate dissolves, and CO2 is needed for this process. They make a distinct noise that you can hear even if you can't see it. Melting. University of Southern Denmark. eCollection 2021 May 24. Huang K, Zhang L, Xu T, Wei H, Zhang R, Zhang X, Ge B, Lei M, Ma JY, Liu LM, Wu H. Nat Commun. atomically dispersed metals; ice melting; kinetic control; nucleation; ultraslow release. Epub 2012 Feb 3. "The chemical removal of CO2 in sea ice occurs in two phases. Specifically, sea-ice formation can cause a release of O2 su- persaturated brines, while sea-ice melt can generate a release of O2 undersaturated melt water (Glud et al., 2002; Rysgaard et al., 2008), confounding measurements of primary produc- tion and respiration during periods of rapid freeze or melt. As climate change causes sea ice to shrinkand new waters open to human explorationthis single-tusked cetacean will likely be exposed to new noises and new threats. official website and that any information you provide is encrypted One key sticking point for him is the presence of sterols in 2.7 billion year old rocks these compounds are only made by living cells in the presence of oxygen. Continue to apply heat, and the water will turn into water vapour, which is water in its gaseous state. Explore our digital archive back to 1845, including articles by more than 150 Nobel Prize winners. Through examination of the shells, the researchers found that changes in CO2 and density are not nearly as tightly linked as previously thought, suggesting something else must be causing CO2 to be released from the ocean. University of Bristol. As a direct result of rising air temperatures, she says, the permafrost is thawing and the landscape is physically crumbling as a result things are changing so fast, and in ways that researchers hadnt even anticipated., The headline of the 2017 Arctic Report Card pulled no punches: Arctic shows no sign of returning to a reliably frozen region. Natali doesnt want to end the conversation on a downer. Mr Lamarche-Gagnon added: "Several orders of magnitude more methane has been hypothesized to be capped beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet than beneath Arctic ice-masses. Although, present in lower concentrations that CO2, methane is approximately 20-28 times more potent. We need to keep as much of the permafrost as we can frozen. The ice placed in the water will melt faster than the ice in air. The loss of Arctic ice is massively compounding the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, ice scientist Professor Peter Wadhams has told BBC Newsnight. The expansion of sea ice during the last ice age acted as a lid on the Southern Ocean, preventing CO2 from escaping. d) of equal duration. 2019 Apr 25;10(23):5898-5905. doi: 10.1039/c9sc00658c. -60C solution synthesis of atomically dispersed cobalt electrocatalyst with superior performance. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. The University of Cambridge will use your email address to send you our weekly research news email. For all the reasons listed above, the clearest ice is ice that freezes slowly and without supercoolingthat is, ice that forms right at 0C. ScienceDaily. As the ice melts, whether over permafrost or the ocean, they reveal the darker earth or ocean underneath. sap next talent program salary. .more .more. Label the second bowl as your variable. The content is provided for information purposes only. Our goal is to make science relevant and fun for everyone. The oxygen is slightly negative and the hydrogen positive. She explains that between 30% and 70% of the permafrost may melt before 2100, depending on how effectively we respond to climate change. This subglacial methane is essentially a biomarker for life in these isolated habitats.". googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2'); }); An international team of researchers led by the University of Bristol camped for three months next to the Greenland Ice Sheet, sampling the meltwater that runs off a large catchment (> 600 km2) of the Ice Sheet during the summer months. The site is secure. Similarly, sunlight exposure increases the conversion of ancient permafrost carbon to CO2 by as much 40 percent in comparison to carbon already in the landscape system, Cory said. Our selection of the week's biggest Cambridge research news and features sent directlyto your inbox. And listed amongst the membership of The Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost, is Swedish NuclearWaste Management who presumably also rely on a permanently frozen permafrost (when BBC Future approached them for comment on this point, they did not respond). We are seeing a big increase in the thaw of permafrost, confirms Emily Osborne, program manager for the Arctic Research Program, NOAA, and editor of the Arctic Report Card, an annual peer-reviewed environmental study of the Arctic. Only recently scientists have realized that sea ice has an impact on the planet's CO2 balance. That is why it is not melting. The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the global average, according to scientists. It lives in polar regions where life is quiet. An international team of researchers led by the University of Bristol camped for three months next to the Greenland Ice Sheet, sampling the meltwater that runs off a large catchment (> 600 km2) of the Ice Sheet during the summer months. Then sprinkle tsp. If you want to melt ice cubes faster, you have to lower the ice's freezing point make it melt into a liquid at a lower temperature than normal. Scientists are finding that those microplastics are accumulating across the entire ocean and being dumped into the Arctic, explains Osborne. Arctic sea ice helps remove carbon dioxide from atmosphere, study shows. A Final Word. Georgia State University: Heat Convection, Purdue Science Department of Chemistry: States of Matter. 2018 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. It is shown that freezing one solution and melting it in another solution provides a new interesting strategy to mix chemicals and to significantly change the reaction kinetics and thermodynamics. We may owe our green Earth to a big freeze that covered the entire planet in thick sheets of ice 2.3 billion years ago, researchers say. Claire is a writer and editor with 18 years' experience. One hypothesis of why ancient carbon is so sensitive to sunlight is that bacteria prefer carbon to be "somewhat baked," but not "excessively baked," said Cory. Get the latest science news in your RSS reader with ScienceDaily's hourly updated newsfeeds, covering hundreds of topics: Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments. The Greenland Ice Sheet emits tons of methane according to a new study, showing that subglacial biological activity impacts the atmosphere far more than previously thought. It doesn't require what the average person thinks of as "sunny," she said. It would melt faster if you spread it out. Close both valves, add either oxite & volatile ice or fuel. Try scrolling around the undiscovered areas of the map and listen for a geyser. S2 ep 5: What is the future of artificial intelligence? Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no ScienceDaily, 3 January 2019. If all the world's permafrost melted, it could double the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, she said. Instead of being reflected away from the Earth, this energy is absorbed, and contributes to warming: "Over that 1% of the Earth's surface you are replacing a bright surface which reflects nearly all of the radiation falling on it with a dark surface which absorbs nearly all. Medical research advances and health news, The latest engineering, electronics and technology advances, The most comprehensive sci-tech news coverage on the web. So how did organisms evolve oxygen tolerance? When ice or any other solid melts, its potential energy increases. HHS Vulnerability Disclosure, Help The first organisms to do this would die, says Hyman Hartman at MIT in Boston, US. The remainder comes from fossil fuels like natural gas. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. The narwhal is among the more introverted of marine mammals. No products in the cart. What scientists are trying to find out now is the composition of these microplastics, what sort of fish are feeding on these and whether we are essentially eating microplastics through eating these fish., In 2016 the Doomsday Vault a sub-permafrost facility in Arctic Norway, which safeguards millions of crop seeds for perpetuity was breached with meltwater (Credit: Alamy), Mercury is also entering the food chain, thanks to thawing permafrost. Latent heat can be understood as energy in hidden form which is supplied or extracted to change the state of a substance without changing its temperature. Most of the Earth's methane is produced by microorganisms that convert organic matter to CH4 in the absence of oxygen, mostly in wetlands and on agricultural land, for instance in the stomachs of cows and rice paddies. ", With Antarctica holding the largest ice mass on the planet, researchers say their findings make a case for turning the spotlight to the south. You can limit them to only carry Ice and limit the mass . However, if UV light penetrated the surface of a glacier, small amounts of peroxide would have been trapped in the glacial ice for long periods, they say. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. This is what happens when the ice cube (a solid) turns into water (a liquid). Water has a maximum density as 4 Celsius. If the sterol results are right, and that is by no means certain, then these rocks pre-date the snowball Earth by 400 million years, and Hartmans theory is wrong. But she adds that studies of animal populations actually suggest that, warmer temperatures also increase the prevalence of viruses and disease, so were seeing a lot more caribou and reindeer becoming more sickly as a result of this warming climate it is just not an environment that is suited to thrive at these warmer temperatures. Natali also says that many areas are experiencing Tundra browning: the higher temperatures lead surface water to evaporate into the atmosphere, causing plants to die off. Before Discover world-changing science. But the species is in for a rude awakening. A frozen Palaeo-Eskimo site in Greenland, preserved for some 4,000 years, is at risk of being washed away. What Natali describes is the visible, dramatic effects of a rapidly warming Arctic. University of Bristol. The water represents the ocean. The reason an ice cube takes up a much smaller area than it does when it melts is that the once-compact particles have spread out and take up more space. The Arctic depends on it. A new study reconstructing conditions at the end of the last ice age suggests that as the Antarctic sea ice melted, massive amounts of carbon dioxide that had been trapped in the ocean were released into the atmosphere. Knowledge awaits. Water freezes at zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190103110300.htm (accessed March 4, 2023). what does bc and sd mean in reloading; plum profile scotiabank; little tokyo buddhist temple 0. does melting ice release oxygen. of sand over the ice cubes in the third bowl. There are fewer water molecules on the liquid side because some of the water has been substituted with salt, so the rate of freezing drops. For a second experience, I put in the support a cilyndrical sheet of ice, about 10-30 cubic centimetres, and a glass of water, about 75-125 cubic centimetres. Set the bowls on a level surface. Accelerating the Melting Process. Melting ice over permafrost and ocean speeds up the melting process Ice is very reflective. Water that was close to the surface now becomes a pond. Many of these ponds are bubbling with methane, as microbes suddenly find themselves with a feast of ancient organic matter to munch on, releasing methane as a by-product. Melting of massive ice lid resulted in huge release of CO2 at the end of the ice age, The Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body, Report on the allegations and matters raised in the BUAV report, Non-human primates (marmosets and rhesus macaques). Latent heat (also known as latent energy or heat of transformation) is energy released or absorbed, by a body or a thermodynamic system, during a constant-temperature process usually a first-order phase transition.. Research (Wash D C). The team calculate that the melting of floating ice accounts for a small amount of the 0.3 millimetres per year unaccounted for in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's best model of . During the last ice age, it was thought that the deepest part of the ocean was made up of very salty, dense water, which was capable of trapping a lot of CO2. The melting ice could have knock-on effects in the UK. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. If you liked this story,sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called If You Only Read 6 Things This Week. I put 800 watts in the microwave. S2 ep2: What did the future look like in the past? does melting ice release oxygen. Pure ice cubes contain only ice and water, which are said to be in dynamic . It's designed to demonstrate a technology that converts carbon dioxide into oxygen . Get weekly and/or daily updates delivered to your inbox. Now, light the furnace. Bookshelf Melting of the Arctic ice cap will increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by releasing greenhouse gases. Why does salt melt ice chemical reaction? Biomaterials. Recent Advances in Single-Atom Electrocatalysts for Oxygen Reduction Reaction. They slide past each other and don't have a regular shape like solids do. And when ice on land melts and water runs into the ocean, sea level rises. If ice was more dense than water we would be on a much much different earth. Melting of this ice may release large quantities of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, causing further warming in a strong positive feedback cycle. of sugar over the ice cubes in another bowl, and tsp. Thus, CO2 gets drawn from the atmosphere into the ocean -- and therefore CO2 gets removed from the atmosphere," explains Dorte Haubjerg Sgaard. Mr Lamarche-Gagnon added: "Several orders of magnitude more methane has been hypothesized to be capped beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet than beneath Arctic ice-masses. Get the latest science news in your RSS reader with ScienceDaily's hourly updated newsfeeds, covering hundreds of topics: Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments. The sea ice extent at 26 August (white) is markedly different from the 1979-2000 average (orange line), Harry: I always felt different to rest of family, US-made cheese can be called 'gruyere' - court, AOC under investigation for Met Gala dress, Mbappe breaks PSG goal record in win over Nantes, Saving Private Ryan actor Tom Sizemore dies at 61, Why Alex Murdaugh was spared the death penalty, Walkie Talkie architect Rafael Violy dies aged 78. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0800-0, Journal information: "The conversion to CO2 is going much faster than previously thought," she said. His first book is Clearing the Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution. Melting it instead will keep all the mass and double the amount of precious water received but can not be moved as easily. In 2012, Sue Natali arrived in Duvanny Yar, Siberia, for the first time. Calcium carbonate cannot move as freely as CO2 and therefore it stays in the sea ice. The permafrost, Dr Romanovsky stressed to Unearthed, does not melt.It thaws. Riddle Solved: Why Was Roman Concrete So Durable? You hear people say we used to pick blueberries over there, and you look over there and its a wetland..