Jeralyn Poe

Beneath the Arctic landscape lies a thick layer of permafrost soil, containing organic matter accumulated over thousands of years, the vast majority of which has remained too cold to decompose. This layer, ranging from less than 1 meter to nearly 1,500 meters thick, stores a significant amount of carbon: The top 1–3 meters of permafrost alone hold about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere of Earth itself [Schuur et al., 2022].