PBS NOVA examines a strange new side effect of global heating through its science-based lens in this week’s program Arctic Sinkholes. The accompanying footage, filmed over months of exploration and analysis in the wintery flats of deepest, darkest Siberia, is both eerie and sobering.
On one level the overhead views of gigantic craters appearing in primeval permafrost resemble similar scenes in the Hollywood horror classic The Thing, in which scientific researchers in Antarctica happen on a giant ice crater and unwittingly release a malevolent beast that is Not of This Earth.
The craters in Arctic Sinkholes are very much of this earth, though, and they are as real as they are unsettling. Sinkholes don’t make for sexy news images like those depicted in the now nightly stream of news bulletins about high winds, savage storms, bone-bracing cold where it should be warm and January spring thaws in northern polar regions where it should be cold. The very words “climate change” are apt to bring a collective groan to those viewers who’ve already written off talk of a global climate crisis as just another social media talking point — the latest fad in café conversation — but there it is: This sudden appearance of sinkholes in previously rock-hard frozen tundra is just one more indicator that the global climate crisis is spiralling out of control — yet another sign that what we are witnessing is not so much a crisis as an impending emergency.
PBS Nova has always been one of the more sober, science-based weekly programs on commercial television, and it’s perhaps no surprise that anyone wanting to learn the hard facts behind strange sightings should turn to a program that has been demystifying the scientific and technological conundrums that have defined our lives on a weekly basis since 1974. Despite the fluff and trivia that dominates the news cycle in cable television — savagely lampooned in Netflix’s Don’t Look Up — there is clearly an appetite for reason and science-based fact across the globe: Nova is now seen in more than 100 countries around the world, and is now available globally on Amazon Prime.
Why do Arctic sinkholes matter, you ask? It’s a fair question, and Nova meets it head on. Over entire eras in geological time the frozen tundra in Canada and Russia’s far north has trapped vast amounts of methane, a group-14 hydride alkane, the main constituent of natural gas. The relative abundance of methane makes it an economically attractive fuel, though capturing and storing it poses technical challenges due to its gaseous state under normal conditions for temperature and pressure. Needless to say, conditions during a worldwide climate crisis are anything but normal. And as heat generating greenhouse gases go, methane makes carbon dioxide look like child’s play. Methane has the potential to boost the heat trapped by already worrying carbon emissions to levels not seen sincethe age of lava rivers and constantly erupting volcanoes.
Arctic Sinkholes shows how many of those craters in Siberia were caused by colossal explosions and reveals a lake in Alaska that literally bubbles with flammable gas. The melting permafrost, and the methane it releases. The name itself, “sinkhole,” is misleading, we learn. The craters are not sinkholes so much as the remnants of underground explosions.
“If permafrost thaws, that's a scary wildcard in the climate change story, because we think there's a huge amount of methane and natural gas trapped inside permafrost and under permafrost,” biogeochemist and aquatic ecologist Katey Walter Anthony says in the program.
“There’s a lot of discussion about carbon dioxide and its relationship to climate, but the impact of methane coming out of the Arctic is potentially enormous,” Nova co-executive producer Julia Cort adds.“Making accurate predictions about the future depends on good data, and Arctic Sinkholes reveals what scientists have to do to get that data, as they try to measure an invisible, odourless gas that’s underground in some of the most remote and challenging environments in the world.”
It’s not a pretty sight.
Nova: Arctic Sinkholes premieres Wednesday at 9/8c on PBS and on the PBS app.