Across the Arctic, permafrost seems to be getting a lot less permanent. As stretches of once-frozen tundra melt, the underlying soil can collapse, leaving behind a bumpy landscape of hollows, hummocks and sinkholes that scientists call thermokarst.

"And in hilly terrain you can get massive landslides—thermokarst failures," says UVM watershed scientist Breck Bowden. Whole hillsides sometimes slough off, dumping tons of sediment into rivers and exposing mineral soils below.

To understand the ecological impacts of these thermokarst failures, Bowden has begun a four-year research study. He's leading a group of 13 investigators from 10 universities to northern Alaska. Funded by $5.5 million from the National Science Foundation, $1 million of the grant will come to UVM.

"The Arctic has long been considered a canary in the coalmine; some of the biggest impacts of climate change are going to be felt there first," Bowden says. As soils frozen for thousands of years collapse, engineers are already struggling with failing roads, buckling foundations and falling pipelines.

"But very few people have thought about the huge ecological impacts," Bowden says.

"When the hillside fails, we get this huge redistribution of nutrients across the landscape," he says," we open up new niches in the landscape for plant colonization, we create opportunities for greenhouse gas emissions, we create opportunities for injecting massive amounts of sediments, and perhaps nutrients, into freshwaters."

Though thermokarst failures happen naturally throughout Arctic landscapes, Bowden and other scientists strongly suspect global warming has changed the equation. Considering estimates that about 70 percent of permafrost will be lost in the Canadian Arctic in the next half-century, "we expect to see many more of these thermokarst failures, which has got to have increasingly significant effects on the environment," Bowden says.

Bowden's field studies will begin next June and continue through 20ll, based out of the Toolik Field Station in the foothills of the Brooks Range. His part of the project will look at the impacts of thermokarst failures on streams. Other scientists will explore the hydraulics of hill-slopes, microbial processes in the soil, indigenous peoples' knowledge of the historical prevalence of thermokarsts, greenhouse emissions, and many other factors — all toward a goal of creating a clearer picture and better forecasting models of the Arctic's warmer future.

"We'll have a synthesis season in 2012," Bowden says, "that will really begin to reveal how all these different studies fit together."

Since the Arctic hold some 30 percent of all the carbon stored in the world, and a mighty store of the potent greenhouse gas methane, the results are likely to underscore scientists' growing awareness that the dynamics of global warming will be hugely influenced by thawing northern soils.