Canada’s North is warming from the ground up, and our infrastructure isn’t ready |
On a winter day in Northern Canada, the cold feels absolute. Snow squeaks underfoot and rivers lie silent beneath thick ice. Yet beneath that familiar surface, the ground is quietly accumulating heat.
That hidden warming is destabilizing the frozen foundation on which northern communities depend. Permafrost — the permanently frozen ground that supports homes, roads, airports and fuel tanks across much of Northern Canada — is warming as a result of climate change. The North has warmed roughly three times faster than the global average, a well-documented effect of Arctic amplification — the process causing the Arctic to warm much faster than the global average.
Permafrost does not fail suddenly. Instead, it responds slowly and cumulatively, storing the heat of warm summers year after year. Over time, that heat resurfaces in visible ways: tilted buildings, cracked foundations, slumping roads and buckling runways. Long-term borehole measurements across Northern Canada confirm that permafrost temperatures continue to rise even in places where the ground surface still refreezes each winter.
Communities in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and the Yukon are already living with these consequences. As permafrost degrades, it undermines housing and transportation corridors and disrupts mobility and land-based activities. The impacts are uneven, with Indigenous communities often facing the greatest exposure and paying the highest costs.
A damaged access road or unstable fuel tank is not just an engineering inconvenience; it can interrupt supply chains, emergency access and daily life. What these patterns reveal is that permafrost thaw is not........