Permafrost is a major actor in the slow-motion disaster movie that we are all trapped inside. It contains vast amounts of carbon. As our planet warms permafrost thaws, releasing greenhouse gases that enter a feedback loop which accelerates climate change. How bad is that? Literally—quantify the danger so we can decide how to respond. We need to dig into the character of permafrost and learn its desires and habits and upbringing, understand what causes it to turn to the dark side. As the saying goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Geomorphology is the area within Earth Sciences that looks at what is happening at or near the Earth’s surface, how physical, chemical, and biological processes form the terrain around us. The landscape has stories to tell. “Geomorphology is the point where geology meets the human timescale,” says Assistant Professor Madison Douglas. She joined the UC Berkeley Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences in 2024, fresh out of the oven of an MIT postdoc. She has plans that will make the permafrost talk.
On the first day of class Douglas likes to do an icebreaker: Picture your favorite natural landscape. Raised in New England, she will pick Walden Pond. Is that place really natural or does it have a human history? Most places that we post-industrial people encounter have already been reshaped by human activity. At Walden Pond it isn’t just the parking lot and gift shop and trail maintenance – concentrated human presence has altered the runoff and compacted the soils such that different flora and fauna thrive, and the depth and contours of the pond and the composition of the water has been altered from what the retreating glacier left at the end of the last ice age. The climate and the geology made the hole but in a very real sense it was human action that filled it in as we see it now.
When earth scientists go to gather data in the field, they aim to understand geomorphological features well enough to predict how they’ll behave in a timeframe that users will value. When will we need to dredge the Delta? How can our server farm run on cheap hydropower? Will the McMansions we built stay up long enough for us to retreat to a country where we’re immune from legal action? Models answer these questions. Sediments flow. Riverbanks erode. Mud settles. The physics of fluid dynamics is straightforward; plug in the data, print out the charts, and there you have it.
