The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

and extends surprisingly far south in the cold eastern interiors of Canada and Siberia (see maps on pages x-xiii). The topmost part thaws inches deep each summer, but beneath this so-called “active layer,” the soil stays hard and frozen year-round. As such, it offers a solid base on which to build roads, buildings, pipelines, and other infrastructure—so long as it always stays frozen. The trick is to not warm it up.

An entire subfield of civil engineering is devoted to building things on top of permafrost without somehow warming it. Houses are raised up off the ground on pilings, roads and railroad tracks are perched atop thick pads of insulating gravel, and so on. Oil pipelines require very careful design because flowing fluid generates a surprising amount of heat, and a ruptured pipeline is an environmental disaster. The world’s latest permafrost engineering feat, completed in 2006 at a cost of USD $4.2 billion, is China’s Qinghai-Tibet Railroad crossing the Tibetan Plateau from Golmud to Lhasa.

But no amount of clever engineering can stop regional permafrost from thawing from milder, snowier winters (snow insulates the ground). When that happens, unless the geological substrate is firm bedrock, the built structures are compromised. The substrate returns to the structural strength of wet mud, or peat, or whatever else it is geologically composed of. The ground slumps, roads buckle, and foundations crack.³⁷³ Pipelines and train tracks become kinked and wavy when they ought to be straight. Even slight undulations force trains to slow down greatly or risk derailment. The sluggardly speeds I’d noticed for parts of the Hudson Bay Express, the otherwise lovely two-night passenger train voyage from Winnipeg and Churchill, was because of this. Deeper kinks require closing down the tracks for repairs. That’s what triggered the line’s closure six weeks later, when I bailed on the train (and my Amundsen shipmates) and caught a flight instead.

Fortunately for OmniTRAX, only the last leg of its long railroad to Churchill lies over permafrost. But other built structures around the Northern Rim are not so lucky. From borehole thermometry and other measurements, we know that permafrost temperatures are generally rising.³⁷⁴ The endgame of this process is ground slumping, tilted trees, sinkholes, and other disturbances.

Already we see evidence of this from space. Using satellites, my UCLA colleague Yongwei Sheng and I mapped out a strange phenomenon now transforming vast tracts of western Siberia. This region famously holds thousands of wellheads supplying natural gas to international markets in Ukraine and Europe. Less famous are the tens of thousands of lakes that dot its surface like so many spilled marbles. By comparing recent satellite pictures of this region with those from the early 1970s, we discovered a landscape mutating as the underlying permafrost thaws, with many of these lakes disappearing into the ground.³⁷⁵

Theoretically, if all permafrost were to go away entirely, about half of the world’s northern lakes and wetlands might conceivably vanish.³⁷⁶ But permafrost thaw is a slow process, so that won’t happen anytime soon. Deep permafrost can extend hundreds of meters downward and requires centuries or millennia to defrost. But significant reductions are expected by 2050, with climate models projecting 13%-29% less permafrost area by then, and the depth of seasonal thawing increasing roughly 50%.³⁷⁷ These numbers are worrisome because from a practical standpoint, the settling and buckling problems commence even when permafrost first starts to thaw. Also troubling is the fact that permafrost ground is commonly stuffed with chunks and lenses of pure ice, which drain out, exacerbating the slumping. Already in Russia, damages to the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) Railroad have more than tripled. The number of threatened buildings ranges from 10% of all structures in Noril’sk to as high as 80% in Vorkuta.³⁷⁸ At the center of this book is a photograph of an apartment building destroyed by thawing permafrost. Just days after the first wall cracks appeared, this building collapsed.

The big message here is that climate warming presents a severe challenge to current and future physical infrastructure in northern permafrost areas. The structural strength of many soils will be reduced, threatening existing structures and making new ones more expensive to engineer and maintain. Some permafrost landscapes will slump, collapse, or suffer hydrological changes, rendering them even less appealing for human activities than they are now.

Projected losses by 2050 in (1) the structural integrity of permafrost soils, a threat to buildings and other permanent infrastructure; and (2) suitably freezing temperatures for the construction of temporary winter roads over wet or soft areas.

The map³⁷⁹ on the previous page illustrates the scale of this problem by midcentury. Part of it derives from a new model of permafrost load-bearing capacity developed by Dmitry Streletskiy, Nikolay Shiklomanov, and Fritz Nelson at the University of Delaware. Dark tones indicate reduced bearing capacities (structural strength) of permafrost soils associated with a middle-of-the road carbon emissions scenario, i.e., the “moderate” (SRES A1B) scenario described in Chapter 5. Widespread losses in Alaska, northern Canada, and most of Siberia suggest that problems of reduced ground strength to support pilings, building foundations, and other heavy installations will be particularly severe there.

The hatched lines on the map are unrelated to permafrost. They illustrate another sort of change that will occur, in places where the ground surface freezes less long and hard during winter than it does now. The repercussions of this are quite different from the threat to infrastructure posed by warming permafrost, as we shall see next.

Ice Road Suckers

The second way in which rising temperatures will make remote northern landscapes less accessible is by reducing our ability to travel on them using winter roads.

Winter roads, also variously called ice roads, snow roads, temporary roads, and other names, are a remarkably well-kept secret. As their name suggests, they are temporary features, requiring a hard, deeply frozen surface to work. Winter roads are used extensively in Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Sweden and are also used in Norway, Finland, Estonia, and several northern U.S. states. In truly remote areas they are the only kind of road at all. Yet, despite their importance, these transient travel lanes rarely show up on maps. Before the popular television series Ice Road Truckers was produced, few people even knew they existed. But in many parts of the North—especially wet, boggy areas—they are the only way to economically resupply villages, run construction projects, harvest timber, find oil and gas, or do just about anything. Away from rivers and coastlines the only other option is to use airplanes and helicopters, which are extremely expensive.

In contrast to its biological life, economic activity on northern landscapes springs to action in winter, after the ground freezes and ground vehicles can be brought in. With remote distances and low population densities, the cost of permanent roads is rarely justified. In contrast, even the most expensive of winter roads—built up like an ice-skating rink by repeatedly glazing it with water—costs 99% less to build.³⁸⁰ So in many remote areas, the road network is not fixed but an ephemeral ghost, expanding briefly each winter, then melting away again in the spring.

One famous winter road, featured in the first season of Ice Road Truckers, is the Tibbitt-Contwoyto ice road built each year in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It begins near the city of Yellowknife and runs six hundred kilometers northeast into Nunavut, supplying a string of highly lucrative diamond mines. This road traverses bog and lakes and can exist only for about two traffic-jammed months out of the year.³⁸¹ During the other ten, the mines can be reached only by air.

Since 2003 one of the richest diamond strikes served by this road has been the Diavik Diamond Mine owned by Rio Tinto, a multinational mining conglomerate. At Diavik’s headquarters in Yellowknife, manager Tom Hoefer explained that the Diavik mine yields four to five carats of diamonds per ton of ore, one of the highest grades ever found (the world average is one carat per ton). To get at the diamonds, the company spent $400 million just to dike back an overlying lake that was in the way.³⁸² Together with one of its neighbors, this mine currently generates about half of the NWT’s gross domestic product. But despite its high grade, without the Tibbitt- Contwoyto road, this mine would be uneconomic. “If we didn’t have this winter road we wouldn’t have these mines,” Hoefer told me. “It’s as simple as that.”³⁸³ Imagine trying to bring in all the heavy equipment, construction materials, and thousands of tons of cement mix by airplane. It just couldn’t be done.

For every Tibbitt-Contwoyto there are thousands of lesser winter roads vital to some economic activity or another. In Siberia I saw many long piles of deep sand running across the taiga. They are dormant winter roads and