BARROW -- Eugene Brower got out of his pickup truck, walked past a boat made of wood and seal skins, and opened the door to a small wooden shack. He lifted a rectangular cover in the floor and started to climb down into the ice cellar his father dug more than 50 years before.

"Ooh! It smells," he said.

It was late September, a week before the start of the fall whaling season, and unseasonably warm. Brower swung his arm around and knocked off giant ice crystals that had formed on the dirt walls.

"Never used to have that," he said. "And it looks smaller."

Ice cellars are dug into the frozen ground, and the temperature in them typically stays well below freezing year-round. But strange things are happening now with ice cellars - people tell stories of taking the lids off them and seeing them filled with water.

It happened to North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta last summer at his family's fish camp. They had dressed a caribou on the way in and set out fish nets when they got there. Itta's children opened the lid to the ice cellar and saw nothing but water.

"You can't do much gathering out there when your natural freezer quits operating," Itta said later.

In January or July, if you're in Alaska, there's a good chance the ground beneath you is frozen solid. There's a very good chance if you're in Barrow or anywhere north of the Brooks Range and a pretty good chance if you're between the Brooks Range and the Alaska Range.

By definition, permafrost is any ground that's been frozen for at least two years. It can be dry soil or nearly all ice, and it can start an inch below the surface or many yards below. It can go down a few feet or a few thousand.

Permafrost affects how water flows through soils, and it largely determines what trees can grow in a given area. It also poses unique challenges for builders, especially in places where a high ice content causes the ground to change dramatically when the permafrost thaws.

Now, as temperatures warm across Alaska, the temperature of the frozen ground is warming, too. In some places, it's warmed to its own tipping point of 32 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point it stops being permafrost and starts being water and soil.

"It's already affecting ecosystems and infrastructure," says Vladimir Romanovsky, a University of Alaska Fairbanks professor who has studied permafrost in Alaska for the last 16 years. And if projections of rising temperatures prove true, the permafrost is likely to warm and thaw much more in the future. According to one estimate, fixing all the roads, sewer systems, and public buildings affected by thawing permafrost in the next few decades could cost billions.

Full Story: http://newsminer.com/news/2008/jul/30/melting-permafrost-poses-threats-infrastructure-al/