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Food cellars, otherwise referred to as ice or meat cellars, (lednik in Russian, k’aetyran in Chukchi, siġļuaq in Iñupiaq, and siqlugaq in Yupik) are a natural form of refrigeration in permafrost or seasonally frozen ground used to preserve, age, and ferment foods harvested for subsistence, including marine mammals, birds, fish, and plants. Indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic have constructed cellars in frozen ground for millennia. This paper focuses on cellars in Russian and American coastal and island communities of the Bering Strait, the region otherwise known as Beringia. This area has a unique, culturally rich, and politically dynamic history. Many traditions associated with cellars are threatened in Chukchi communities in Russia because of the impacts of climate change, relocation, dietary changes, and industrial development. However, even with warmer temperatures, cellars still provide a means to age and ferment food stuffs following traditional methods. In cooperation with local stakeholders, we measured internal temperatures of 18 cellars in 13 communities throughout the Bering Strait region and northern Alaska. Though cellars are widely used in permafrost regions, their structure, usage, and maintenance methods differ and exhibit influences of local climates, traditions, and economic activities. Monitoring internal temperatures and recording structural descriptions of cellars is important in the face of climate change to better understand the variety and resilience of living adaptations in different cold regions. 

Accurate understanding of permafrost dynamics is critical for evaluating and mitigating impacts that may arise as permafrost degrades in the future; however, existing projections have large uncertainties. Studies of how permafrost responded historically during Earth’s past warm periods are helpful in exploring potential future permafrost behavior and to evaluate the uncertainty of future permafrost change projections. Here, we combine a surface frost index model with outputs from the second phase of the Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project to simulate the near‐surface (~3 to 4 m depth) permafrost state in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-Pliocene warm period (mPWP, ~3.264 to 3.025 Ma). This period shares similarities with the projected future climate. Constrained by proxy-based surface air temperature records, our simulations demonstrate that near‐surface permafrost was highly spatially restricted during the mPWP and was 93 ± 3% smaller than the preindustrial extent. Near‐surface permafrost was present only in the eastern Siberian uplands, Canadian high Arctic Archipelago, and northernmost Greenland. The simulations are similar to near‐surface permafrost changes projected for the end of this century under the SSP5-8.5 scenario and provide a perspective on the potential permafrost behavior that may be expected in a warmer world. 

While the world continues to work toward an understanding and projections of climate change impacts, the Arctic increasingly becomes a critical component as a bellwether region. Scientific cooperation is a well-supported narrative and theme in general, but in reality, presents many challenges and counter-productive difficulties. Moreover, data sharing specifically represents one of the more critical cooperation requirements, as part of the “scientific method [which] allows for verification of results and extending research from prior results”. One of the important pieces of the climate change puzzle is permafrost. In general, observational data on permafrost characteristics are limited. Currently, most permafrost data remain fragmented and restricted to national authorities, including scientific institutes. The preponderance of permafrost data is not available openly—important datasets reside in various government or university labs, where they remain largely unknown or where access restrictions prevent effective use. Although highly authoritative, separate data efforts involving creation and management result in a very incomplete picture of the state of permafrost as well as what to possibly anticipate. While nations maintain excellent individual permafrost research programs, a lack of shared research—especially data—significantly reduces effectiveness of understanding permafrost overall. Different nations resource and employ various approaches to studying permafrost, including the growing complexity of scientific modeling. Some are more effective than others and some achieve different purposes than others. Whereas it is not possible for a nation to effectively conduct the variety of modeling and research needed to comprehensively understand impacts to permafrost, a global community can. In some ways, separate scientific communities are not necessarily concerned about sharing data—their work is secured. However, decision and policy makers, especially on the international stage, struggle to understand how best to anticipate and prepare for changes, and thus support for scientific recommendations during policy development. To date, there is a lack of research exploring the need to share circumpolar permafrost data. This article will explore the global data systems on permafrost, which remain sporadic, rarely updated, and with almost nothing about the subsea permafrost publicly available. The authors suggest that the global permafrost monitoring system should be real time (within technical and reasonable possibility), often updated and with open access to the data (general way of representing data required). Additionally, it will require robust co-ordination in terms of accessibility, funding, and protocols to avoid either duplication and/or information sharing. Following a brief background, this article will offer three supporting themes, (1) the current state of permafrost data, (2) rationale and methods to share data, and (3) implications for global and national interests. 

Abstract Lakes are an important ecosystem component and geomorphological agent in northern high latitudes and it is important to understand how lake initiation, expansion and drainage may change as high latitudes continue to warm. In this study, we utilized Landsat Multispectral Scanner System images from the 1970s (1972, 1974, and 1975) and Operational Land Imager images from the 2010s (2013, 2014, and 2015) to assess broad-scale distribution and changes of lakes larger than 1 ha across the four permafrost zones (continuous, discontinuous, sporadic, and isolated extent) in western Alaska. Across our 68 000 km²study area, we saw a decline in overall lake coverage across all permafrost zones with the exception of the sporadic permafrost zone. In the continuous permafrost zone lake area declined by −6.7% (−65.3 km²), in the discontinuous permafrost zone by −1.6% (−55.0 km²), in the isolated permafrost zone by −6.9% (−31.5 km²) while lake cover increased by 2.7% (117.2 km²) in the sporadic permafrost zone. Overall, we observed a net drainage of lakes larger than 10 ha in the study region. Partial drainage of these medium to large lakes created an increase in the area covered by small water bodies <10 ha, in the form of remnant lakes and ponds by 7.1% (12.6 km²) in continuous permafrost, 2.5% (15.5 km²) in discontinuous permafrost, 14.4% (74.6 km²) in sporadic permafrost, and 10.4% (17.2 km²) in isolated permafrost. In general, our observations indicate that lake expansion and drainage in western Alaska are occurring in parallel. As the climate continues to warm and permafrost continues to thaw, we expect an increase in the number of drainage events in this region leading to the formation of higher numbers of small remnant lakes. 

We studied processes of ice-wedge degradation and stabilization at three sites adjacent to road infrastructure in the Prudhoe Bay Oilfield, Alaska, USA. We examined climatic, environmental, and subsurface conditions and evaluated vulnerability of ice wedges to thermokarst in undisturbed and road-affected areas. Vulnerability of ice wedges strongly depends on the structure and thickness of soil layers above ice wedges, including the active, transient, and intermediate layers. In comparison with the undisturbed area, sites adjacent to the roads had smaller average thicknesses of the protective intermediate layer (4 cm vs. 9 cm), and this layer was absent above almost 60% of ice wedges (vs. ∼45% in undisturbed areas). Despite the strong influence of infrastructure, ice-wedge degradation is a reversible process. Deepening of troughs during ice-wedge degradation leads to a substantial increase in mean annual ground temperatures but not in thaw depths. Thus, stabilization of ice wedges in the areas of cold continuous permafrost can occur despite accumulation of snow and water in the troughs. Although thermokarst is usually more severe in flooded areas, higher plant productivity, more litter, and mineral material (including road dust) accumulating in the troughs contribute to formation of the intermediate layer, which protects ice wedges from further melting.