This region may hold the key to the future of our climate
as global warming takes hold.
It's one of the remotest and coldest
places on the planet.
For much of the year
temperatures fall to -40 degrees Celsius, freezing everything solid,
including the ground.
But hidden in this frozen ground known as permafrost
is a potential climate disaster.
It's called methane.
And it's a far more powerful greenhouse gas
than carbon dioxide.
The danger is
if the permafrost was to melt as a result of global warming,
it could release methane on a massive scale.
Ecologist Katie Walter
believes that it's already beginning to happen.
She's studying the lakes that cover the region.
The permafrost
contains a very large pool of organic carbon.
It's dead plant matter.
And that dead plant matter when it is thought out in the bottoms
of the lakes it’s a food source for organisms that produce methane.
They eat the dead plant matter and they burp out methane.
Methane is the byproduct of their digestion, and it bubbles up
from the lake sediments and gets trapped in the ice.
If Katie's right, then the ice should be full of bubbles of methane.
To find out the extent of the problem,
Katie and an assistant head out onto the middle of the frozen lake.
First they remove the snow covering the ice.
Before using tea from their flask
to clear the surface.
You can actually see the bubbles trapped in the ice.
They're beautiful.
The ice can be crystal clear with little bubbles, almost like coins
stacked on top of one another.
And what's happening is that as the bubbles are released
from the sediments beneath, they wobble up through the water column
and they hit the ice that's forming and thickening overhead.
And so the bubbles actually freeze in place.
The trouble is,
if these are bubbles of methane, it won't stay trapped in the ice for long.
When the ice thaws in spring, the gas will escape.
There's one sure way to check just how much methane is in these bubbles,
because it's highly flammable.
When you poke a hole into those pillars of methane
you get this stream of gas that comes out and depending on the size of your hole,
you can get a very large stream of gas.
So when you light that, you get a very large flame
and you have to be careful because sometimes you can singe your eyebrows .
These bubbles can be found all over the place.
There must be enormous amounts of methane
being released here.
And that has serious implications.
The methane then heats the atmosphere, contributing to global warming,
which then causes more permafrost to melt and more methane to be produced.
And it's sort of this vicious feedback cycle.
We think of this permafrost here, like as a time bomb
waiting to go off.
And it's potentially a very big time bomb.
This great frozen expanse covers an area of
well over nine and a half million square kilometers.
That's bigger than the United States.
If all the permafrost were to melt then it could release enough methane
to raise levels in the atmosphere by ten times.
That would be certain to speed up global warming.
But by how much and with what consequences?
Nobody can really say yet.