Fwd: Alaska's permafrost meltdown

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Nov 3, 2025, 10:43:48 AM (5 days ago) Nov 3

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The Arctic has warmed four times faster than anywhere else on the planet, and today’s newsletter takes you to Alaska for a firsthand view. There, researchers are racing to understand what’s happening to permafrost and the 1.4 trillion tons of carbon it stores. Nothing less than the fate of the climate hangs in the balance.

Plus, we look at how the AI boom has sent clean tech stocks soaring — and the risks a bubble poses. And we have exclusive insights from EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra on how next week’s COp30 climate talks are set to fare without the US.

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Extreme science on top of the world

By Danielle Bochove

On the last day of August, as the High North summer tips to autumn, I found myself balancing on the gunnels of a 10-foot inflatable Achilles raft bouncing across whitecaps scudding the Beaufort Sea. The temperature was barely above freezing, the sun fickle.

It's a short ride but the only dry way to get me, lacking hip-waders, to a waterlogged patch of tundra beside one of Hilcorp Alaska’s massive oil pads where the team of scientists from Woods Hole, Massachusetts, I’ve embedded with will be gathering data all week. (The boat serves another purpose, which I’ll get to.)

Doing climate research under the shadow of an oil rig is ironic, to say the least, but in this part of the world, there’s no other option. Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil fields are the largest in North America. Once you travel north to Deadhorse — a "town" that exists solely to serve the vast oil production complex — it’s the end of the road unless you can get permission from one of the oil companies to access the land they lease on the edge of the Arctic Ocean for fossil fuel extraction.

The scientists take a soil sample at the edge of a Beaufort Sea lagoon. Photographer: Nathaniel Wilder

The work on this scientific project is multifaceted, but the common denominator is saltwater. As sea levels rise and storms get more violent, the ocean is washing over the tundra with increasing frequency.

The team is studying knock-on effects, including the impact that inundation may be having on permafrost. The frozen layer of mineral soil, rock and undecomposed organic material stretches across millions of acres and contains roughly 1.4 trillion tons of carbon. Understanding how fast it’s thawing is key to gauging how much previously frozen carbon is being released into the atmosphere, and ultimately the state of the global carbon budget.

The days were long — we were up at 6 a.m. and often couldn’t make it back to camp before the kitchen closed — but the scientists stayed deeply focused on their work. In fact, they were so intense I found myself doubting whether any of them would even notice if one of the polar bears in the area wandered by.

I learned about their experiments, but I also learned that scanning the horizon for polar bears 10 hours a day strains the eyes as well as the nerves. I felt better when the project lead, Julia Guimond, told me she has polar bear dreams before every expedition — and worse when the team’s veteran, Jim McClelland, said that’s because two years ago, a polar bear pawed through their equipment while they ran and escaped in the boat. (In addition to transporting reporters, it serves as a bear escape vehicle.)

Happily, this trip was bear-free.

Julia Guimond pulls a stake from a Beaufort Sea lagoon. Photographer: Nathaniel Wilder

Among the many images indelibly etched in my memory is one of Guimond plunging her shoulders beneath the frigid water of No Point Creek, feeling for the underwater equipment she installed back in July. With her orange toque and dripping bare arms, she looked like a character on some yet-to-be-created Alaska reality TV show.

It might not be a bad backup plan. The state of scientific funding in the US is dire right now, with widespread cuts by the Trump administration. The stakes are particularly high for Alina Spera and Liz Elmstrom, the younger postdoctoral researchers on this trip, whose careers depend on landing funding that can act as a launchpad for their own research.

“It’s not the easiest career path,” Elmstrom told me one evening, but there’s no work that makes her happier.

On our last day in the field, it’s not hard to see why. The sun came out, coats came off, and with the bulk of the work done, we paused to marvel at the weather. I took my first five-minute ‘’tundra nap” and we all enjoyed a packed lunch on the beach.

Noticing that his fingers are clean after being caked in grime from gathering core samples, McClelland deadpanned, “I likely ate some 1000-year-old dirt.”

It’s a moment of levity before one last afternoon push. And then it’s time to pack the samples in coolers, load them on trucks and scrub the boat.

The contents of those coolers are now back in Massachusetts, undergoing months of analysis. As more pieces of the permafrost carbon sink puzzle are filled in, the magnitude of the challenge the world faces will become clear. If more of this vast store of carbon starts to leak into the atmosphere, the climate will heat up to still more dangerous levels.

And the permafrost is just one natural carbon sink within the vast carbon budget. Follow our series looking at the entire system in the coming months, starting with this one.

Please subscribe to Bloomberg News for more on-the-ground reporting from the frontlines of climate change.

Big risks

20%

The percent of northern permafrost researchers estimate is susceptible to abrupt thaw.

A costly meltdown

“When somebody at the end of the 21st century in Alaska tallies up the cost of climate change, permafrost thaw will be the single most expensive thing because it is impacting stuff that is so expensive.”

Rick Thoman

Climate analyst, International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks

Permafrost thaw is impacting critical Arctic infrastructure as well as the climate.

Clean tech euphoria — for now

By Natasha White, Alastair Marsh, and Coco Liu

A dramatic rebound in clean-tech stocks has investors in the green economy hoping they can finally turn the page on years of punishing underperformance.

The timing is somewhat unexpected. Even as President Donald Trump has canceled many US government programs dedicated to boosting wind, solar and electric vehicles, green stocks have become one of this year’s most lucrative bets.

Those equities have significantly outpaced most other stock indexes. The S&P’s main gauge tracking clean energy is up about 50% this year; the MSCI World Index has gained less than 20% in the same period.

Much of that development is pegged to a near-insatiable demand for energy to power the data centers feeding artificial intelligence. It also reflects China’s relentless drive to build out its low-carbon economy. For investors, those factors have outweighed Trump’s attacks on what he often calls the “green scam.”

Analysts at Jefferies have seized on the moment to declare this the “glory days” for green investors, even dedicating an entire client event to the idea.

Aniket Shah, global head of sustainability and transition strategy at Jefferies, says investors have been too distracted by Trump’s anti-green rhetoric in the US. Instead, they should look at the global level of capital piling into clean technologies: the $2 trillion dedicated to low-carbon spending last year is an “insane number” that indicates the green economy is enjoying a “wonderful moment,” according to Shah.

But not all investors are convinced the green stock rally is solid. And some worry that too much of it is tied to AI, around which bubble speculation persists.

Tim Bachmann, a climate-tech portfolio manager at the fund management unit of Deutsche Bank AG, DWS, says investors should be prepared for another “Deepseek moment,” referring to the Chinese startup that stunned the world earlier this year after it unveiled a low-cost, energy-efficient version of AI.

The idea that it might be possible to power AI with considerably less energy than assumed in the US was “a shock not only in the data-center operators, but also in the suppliers of cooling, ventilation equipment, cables, transformers,” Bachmann says.

Alex Monk, a portfolio manager for the global resource equities team at Schroders, says the alternative energy sector would likely be dragged down by a bursting AI bubble.

Investors need to be aware that “sometimes, when you have these broad thematic flows, you can detach a bit from valuations,” says Timothy Ho, European utilities and renewables analyst at Amundi SA, Europe’s biggest asset manager. And that means markets “can end up detaching a bit from fundamentals, at least temporarily.”

Read the full story.

Join the conversation

Photographer: Thomas Morfin/AFP/Getty Images

Around 150 countries will soon gather in Brazil for the COP30 climate summit. What are the key results negotiators are aiming for — and how could talks break down? Bloomberg journalists Akshat Rathi, Jennifer Dlouhy, John Ainger and Fabiano Maisonnave will answer your questions in a Live Q&A today starting at 1 p.m. EST (3 p.m. BRT). Stream here.

Got a question now? Send it in early to liv...@bloomberg.net

Trump’s ‘watershed moment’

By Danielle Bochove

EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said the US retreat on green commitments will damage the potential for global impact as well as the overall mood at the upcoming COP30 talks in Brazil, but that it points to new “partnerships and opportunities” for other nations to forge progress.

The US said on Friday that it will not send high-level officials to the United Nations-sponsored events, which start next week in the Amazonian city of Belém. President Donald Trump in January initiated the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, a process that takes a year.

Wopke Hoekstra Photographer: Simon Wohlfahrt/Bloomberg

“We’re talking about the largest, the most dominant, most important geopolitical player from the whole world. It is the second largest emitter,” Hoekstra said of the US, in an interview in Toronto on Saturday. “So if a player of that magnitude basically says, ‘Well, I’m going to leave and have it all sorted out by the rest of you,’ clearly that does damage.”

While describing the US absence from COP30 as a “watershed moment,” Hoekstra, the EU’s climate chief and a former minister in the Netherlands, pointed to the continuing engagement of many US governors and mayors on climate issues. He also cited the ongoing business case for decarbonization.

American companies “might no longer write the C word in capitals,” he said, referring to climate. “But if there is a business case to continue with solar or batteries or wind, and that business case is sound, well, what do business people do? They try to reap these benefits, and rightly so.”

Read the full story.

More from Green

Investors worried that artificial intelligence bets look too frothy shouldn’t assume the clean-tech companies powering AI would be trapped in the same bubble, according to a BlackRock Inc portfolio manager.

The death toll in Vietnam from last week’s record-breaking downpours has climbed to 37 as another powerful storm bears down on the country’s coast.

Jamaica’s $150 million catastrophe bond has now triggered as a result of the fallout from Hurricane Melissa, the government said.

Worth a listen

A tanker truck bearing the Air Liquide SA logo Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

Just three companies control the lion’s share of the $120 billion global market for industrial gases: Linde, Air Liquide & Air Products. And because the production of these gases is so energy intensive, each company consumes as much electricity as some small to medium-sized European countries. This week on Zero, Sanjiv Lamba, CEO of Linde, tells Akshat Rathi how he sees electricity demand changing, what Linde is doing to transition to clean sources, and whether low-carbon hydrogen can ever become big business.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.