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Short abstract:

Social sciences and humanities usually examine soils as multi-species communities that offer original insights into the processes of soil health. But once we turn our attention to frozen soils―the focus shifts. I explore what thawing permafrost teaches us about the notions of degradation.

Long abstract:

Social sciences and humanities usually examine soils as multi-species communities that offer original insights into the processes of soil health and soil repair. But once we turn our attention to frozen soils―the focus shifts. Instead of facing concerns with the soil’s fertility, we encounter worries about the ground’s stability and incapacity to provide a more or less reliable foundation for built and natural environments. This paper examines the rise of scientific attempts to monitor the thermal states of frozen earth known as permafrost (or vechnaia merzlota) currently warming, thawing, and degrading in ways hard to predict. It draws upon interviews with permafrost scientists from Russia, Norway, the United States, and Sweden to present a detailed analysis of a seemingly self-evident practice: measuring permafrost's thermal state. I start by outlining conceptual tensions that Soviet frozen earth scientists encountered when defining permafrost and its degradation already in the 1930s. I then examine sporadic national attempts at measuring changes within permafrost dynamics, followed by more systematic attempts at building an international system of monitoring permafrost in the 1990s that turned that ground into a planetary environmental object. Finally, I dig into the intricacies of choosing the 'right' way to measure permafrost's thermal state to find out what notions of frozen earth―it being a territory, a process, or a sensitive medium―each of those methods make possible. As a result, the paper questions the notion of permafrost's thawing as a unitary process, which has vast consequences for our understanding of degradation and preservation.