Hello everyone! Its our first update in a while, as the internet has been intermittent and the team has just returned from a two day trip upriver. We went to a place called Duvannyi Yar, where Pleistocene-era soils are eroding at a massive rate as the underlying permafrost thaws and massive wedges of ice melt.

The landscape is surreal, with mounds of soil and ice up to 40 feet tall, rivers of mud flowing on all sides, and 10,000-year-old bones emerging from the ground. The whole landscape is sliding into the river.

Patches of “quickmud” threaten to steal your boots, or worse. The science is not in, but it seems that global warming is melting this landscape before our eyes. It is striking that the burning of fossil fuels all over the world is causing this change here – and igniting positive feedbacks that threaten the world as we know it.