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Melting Permafrost Endangers Infrastructure
Melting permafrost is making infrastructure in the Arctic unstable.
“The Arctic is incredibly strategically important. We can reach just about any theatre in the northern hemisphere from Alaska,” Pentagon spokesperson Eric Pahon.
Also buildings, pipelines and other infrastructure built atop pilings require what’s called “passive refrigeration” to keep thawing permafrost from destabilizing the structures.
“The Air Force is spending a lot of money in Alaska to deal with this problem,” McCoy said.
(Via SciAm.)
In his 1970 novel Tower of Glass, Robert Silverberg tries to solve the problem of how to build a great tower in an unstable tundra:
Warming temperatures are thawing out the frozen ground, and in the process it is threatening to unsettle structures that were built decades ago.
From the tower's huge octagonal base radiate wide silvery strips of refrigeration tape, embedded fifty centimeters deep in the frozen carpet of soil, roots, moss, and lichens that is the tundra. The tapes stretch several kilometers in each direction. Their helium-II diffusion cells soak up the heat generated by the androids and vehicles used in building the tower. If the tapes were not there, the tundra would soon be transformed by the energy-output of construction into a lake of mud; the colossal tower's foundation-caissons would lose their grip, and the great building would tilt and tumble like a felled titan...
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 5/19/2023)
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