riking example is a nearby lake that deepened by about half a meter when thaw at the lake base reached a salty layer, illustrating how small shifts in sub-surface chemistry can yield outsized surface changes. The researchers anticipate a broader international mapping effort to determine the full geographic reach of the phenomenon and to understand its implications for communities built on permafrost.

“It's basically salt on the frozen driveway,” - Tim Appenzeller, Science News Editor

22:T6e5,that's right. On a couple of peninsulas in Siberia that jut into the Arctic Ocean, there There have been these weird craters that have appeared over the past 20 years or so, several dozen of them, and they're really quite dramatic. They're 10s of meters across, 10s of meters deep. They form suddenly, and, uh, you know, gradually they get filled in by water and they become just another lake, but they have sheer sides, and clearly something exploded. And no one has actually seen one form. These are not very populated areas. The scientists have gone and they find there is methane in the crater. Now the permafrost is full of methane. It's in the form of a this sort of the molecules are caged in in ice. It's called a gas hydrate. So, methane has been released from these gas hydrates, and the question is how. The methane, by the way, it doesn't, it isn't bursting into flame and creating an explosion. This is just gas pressure, and one theory is that deep layers of salty water are helping to drive the process. There are multiple steps. As the shallow permafrost melts, you've got more water circulating through the soil, more freshwater that gets drawn into these salty lenses, they call them, these lenses are very saline water through a process called osmosis. As these lenses swell, they generate pressure on the soil. They fracture it, and the soil is fractured. Pressure in the soil that holds the methane in that watery cage or icy cage is relieved, and so the methane

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Salty permafrost’s role in Arctic melting, the promise of continuous protein monitoring, and death in the ancient world

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