Ask around and you’ll find that not many people can say they have heard of a pingo, let alone describe one.
Yet these strange, often beautiful, geomorphic curiosities are increasingly coming under scrutiny from climate scientists.
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What is a pingo?
Pingos are mounds of earth-covered ice that form in regions of permafrost. As the climate warms, they are degrading, releasing a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide in the process.
Studying pingos
The problem with studying pingos, as I was to learn, is that they can be a devil to reach. Indeed, the challenges associated with their remoteness is one of the reasons why the Arctic Research Group (ARG), which has been conducting expeditions in the High Arctic for 35 years, was asked to make pingo-hunting part of its 2023 expedition to Recherchefjorden, Svalbard.
This trip, undertaken over three weeks in August, would not just be about gathering data to inform climate models. After yet another year of record-breaking global temperatures, there is an urgent need to enhance public understanding about the complex ways climate change is affecting Earth’s geology, and how geology might in turn impact the climate. As a writer who loves roughing it in the cold, I leapt at the invitation to go along.
How do pingos form?
Pingos typically form as conical humps. They come in all sizes, from tiny hillocks of just a few metres to vast structures, such as Canada’s Ibyuk Pingo, which stands nearly 50m high and 300m wide. They form when groundwater makes its way into the permafrost (a thick layer of soil below the ground’s surface that remains below 0 ̊C) and freezes, pushing the ground upwards as the ensuing lump of ice expands. If rising temperatures then cause a pingo’s ice core to melt, the ground above can collapse, creating a depression that, to the untrained eye, can resemble a mini-volcano, but filled with icy water instead of molten rock.
How do melting pingos affect the climate?
Climate scientists are studying pingos because Arctic permafrost traps vast stores of greenhouse gases, including methane, which has a warming effect 80 times greater than CO2 in the first 20 years after reaching the atmosphere and around 30 times greater after 100 years. Collapsing pingos disrupt and expose the permafrost, releasing these gases into the atmosphere.
“Climate change is degrading pingos,” says Andy Hodson, professor of glaciology at the University Centre in Svalbard. “One of my favourites is 40m high, and it’s eroding like nuts. The whole thing has really changed in the past few years."
To hit home just how dramatic the changes are, some pingos are even leaking an oil-like substance where they form above shale rock. “It’s not just gases coming out now,” says Andy. “There are pingos out here that are leaking [liquid] hydrocarbons.”
Given the Arctic is warming at more than twice the global rate, the race is now on to sample water from as many pingos as possible to understand how much methane could be released under different scenarios, and feed that data into predictive models. And that’s how I found myself on a choppy, 12-hour boat ride from the small town of Longyearbyen to Recherchefjorden, with a 10-strong team of researchers.
Journey to Svallbard
Upon arrival, with beluga whales surfacing as we offloaded to shore, our team – who would carry out various research projects – began setting up base camp. Grazing reindeer and nesting birds were making the most of the Arctic summer, while immense and distant glaciers occasionally broke apart, sending ice tumbling into the sea with a deep and ominous roar.
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After four days of waiting for a suitable weather window, during which time we busied ourselves poring over maps and helping others to prepare for their own research projects, the ocean finally calmed enough for us to make a start. On the fifth day, I joined a trio of pingo-hunters – Siri Enckell, Mike Haynes and Joe Cox – in a small motorboat bound for the nearby Chamberlindalen Valley.
Work carried out by Andy and colleagues in northern Svalbard, where a series of pingos exists above shale bedrock, had already confirmed that high levels of methane were present whenever a pingo was leaking water. The question that needed answering now was whether this is also true for the pingos in south-west Svalbard, which sit upon metamorphic rocks (rocks that change composition and texture with heat and pressure from Earth’s crust), and broadly follow a fault line.
Upon arriving in Chamberlindalen, however, the first task was to find a camping spot on high ground. We needed the clearest views possible of the valley to keep a lookout for polar bears, which take on an almost supernatural aura in this vast and brutal landscape, and whose presence requires constant vigilance. As we hiked inland, none of these giant predators could be seen, but we were greeted by one of Svalbard’s friendlier creatures: an inquisitive Arctic fox, its fur white-brown and its eyes a piercing orange.
One of several tragedies I was to encounter during the expedition is that rabies – a death sentence that also removes an animal’s timidity – still circulates in Svalbard’s Arctic fox population. With or without the disease, curious and cunning foxes can be a nuisance around camp. Mike and Siri managed to scare our visitor away with some hollering, but the fox continued to follow us at a distance until we had located a campsite. It was an interesting welcome to the land of pingos.
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Analysing the pingos
Over the next few days, the team assessed the target pingos that had been pre-identified through satellite imagery. Some appeared fossilised and yielded no water; others provided only small amounts.
However, those furthest away in the adjoining Dunderdalen Valley, which required a challenging trek over rough terrain, through rivers and along gorges, did provide what we were seeking: large, blue-grey pools of meltwater. Joe and I immediately began taking samples as Siri recorded data and GPS coordinates. Mike, meanwhile, kept watch for bears.
Polar bear in the camp
On the third day, after a gruelling hike to the most distant pingos, we received the unsettling message via satellite phone that there was a large male polar bear about 14km away, heading along the coast in our direction. We were equipped with the means to deter an attack, yet a feeling of vulnerability lingered, underscoring the sense that we were but passing guests in a true wilderness.
The nervous feeling intensified that night, under the Arctic’s perpetual summer sun, when I sensed something outside the tent. It wouldn’t be the first time an ARG team had experienced a midnight encounter with a polar bear. As expedition leader Chris Searston had recounted before we set off, a bear had charged into camp during an assignment in 1993.
Moments later, the tripwire alarms around the camp’s perimeter fired, and two extremely loud, blank shots echoed throughout the valley. The adrenaline hit was quick and dramatic. Mike and Joe quickly joined me in yelling, while Siri blasted an old ship’s foghorn, filling the air with as much noise as we could muster. After a minute or two, an eerie silence descended and we cautiously stepped outside the tent. There was nothing there. Heart racing, I scanned the valley with binoculars, ensuring every pale rock or patch of snow surrounding the distant pingos was just that.
What a unique joy to realise it was a false alarm – and that it was our curious friend, the orange-eyed Arctic fox, that had sneakily pulled the tripwires, and was now watching us, probably with some confusion, from across the valley.
The remaining fieldwork was completed with increased caution, remembering our luck when coming across fresh polar bear tracks along the shoreline, and fresh bear droppings – which, in yet another tragedy for this unique ecosystem, were filled not only with partially digested seal fur, but fragments of plastic.
The CLIMAGAS project
The samples and data collected by the ARG have now been incorporated into a much broader body of work being carried out by Andy and Lise Øvreås, a microbial ecologist at the University of Bergen. Together, they lead the CLIMAGAS project, which aims to build a comprehensive understanding of the release of methane in permafrost regions and to predict future emissions under various climate scenarios.
“We’ve worked coast to coast mapping every bit of groundwater that’s escaping from the system during winter,” says Andy. “We’re going to show that some of the largest natural emissions of gas in Norway come from Svalbard, escaping as the permafrost and glaciers respond to warming.”
Methane emissions from pingos are significant, yet ultimately pale in comparison to those caused by human activity, such as food waste in landfills, parts of the oil and gas industry, or mismanaged coal mines. Andy calculates that Svalbard’s methane emissions amount to just 0.3 per cent of what a single Russian coal mine produces. So if pingos seem small fry compared to other sources, why pay them so much attention?
Why is the study of pingos so important?
Drew Shindell is a professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment in North Carolina, USA. He says that only by understanding all sources of methane release can we optimise policies for reduction. “We have plenty of uncertainties in our current analyses,” he says.
Drew adds that we should also be concerned by natural sources of methane release that may be increasing due to climate change as we have a “very limited ability” to control them. Meanwhile, there are other sources, such as agriculture, that are so intricately tied to lifestyle and livelihoods that they may be almost impossible to change. “In contrast, reducing emissions from the fossil fuel and waste sectors is, at least in principle, something virtually everyone thinks is a good idea,” he says.
Scientists have now called on governments to import natural gas (which is comprised mostly of methane) that has been managed to minimise leaks during extraction, processing and transport. Other initiatives, such as the Global Methane Pledge, hope a voluntary collective effort can reduce global methane emissions by at least 30 per cent from 2020 levels by 2030.
How is climate change affecting the Arctic?
Whether the Arctic’s unique wildlife can adapt fast enough to such a rapidly warming region is another question. “Data is lacking for most species and most of the Arctic,” says Brage Bremset Hansen, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.
Even with limited data, what we do know is the impact of a warming climate varies greatly depending on location and season, bringing both population declines and growth. Reindeer might have more food with longer summers, while polar bears might swap hunting on the ice pack for more land prey. But every ecosystem has its limits – we just don’t yet know where Svalbard’s is yet.
In the meantime, it’s essential to gather as much data as possible – which means scientists will continue to trek to remote pingos scattered across the archipelago in their quest to piece together this complex climate puzzle.
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