Temperatures 3 feet down into the ground are less than half a degree below freezing. They drilled permafrost cores with a power auger, took other sediment and water samples and embedded temperature probes in the frozen ground. At one northern site, he said, permafrost temperatures at shallow depths have climbed from minus 8 degrees Celsius to minus 3. And there is no doubt that thawing of the full depth of permafrost would take millenniums.But Romanovsky said that his and others' work shows that permafrost "is not as stable as people thought. "There's a massive amount of carbon that's in the ground, that's built up slowly over thousands and thousands of years," he said.

Source: Economic Times August 24, 2017 04:30 UTC