On a July afternoon in the eastern Siberian town of Cherskiy, 220 kilometres north of the Arctic circle, it is a warm 27 ℃. The vista features silver-blue rivers bisecting green swathes of boreal forest - Earth's biggest ecosystem. But drive a metal rod into the soil and roughly 75 centimetres below the surface you hit a layer that's as hard as steel - and perhaps as dangerous as dynamite. Arctic permafrost holds more than twice as much carbon in its frozen soil as Earth's atmosphere. Which is what brings me here, accompanying seven US scientists from various labs, led by the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. We have travelled 7000 kilometres and 15 time zones to Cherskiy to study a phenomenon that might hasten the release of that carbon: the rise of Arctic wildfires.
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