Overview
- Researchers incubated Alaskan permafrost cores from the U.S. Army Corps’ Permafrost Tunnel with deuterium-labeled water at 25, 39 and 54 degrees Fahrenheit to simulate warmer summers.
- Microbial wake-up was initially extremely slow—about one cell per 100,000 per day—but after roughly six months the communities reorganized, became highly active, and formed visible biofilms.
- Heavy-water tracing showed microbes were synthesizing cell membranes, with glycolipids playing a key role in long-term survival and reactivation.
- Wake-up speed did not vary with incubation temperature, pointing to the length of the warm period rather than brief heat spikes as the driver of reactivation.
- The peer-reviewed findings, published in JGR Biogeosciences by Tristan Caro and colleagues, suggest potential for increased CO2 and methane release yet remain constrained by single-site, sealed-lab conditions that limit direct scaling.