Permafrost Quotes

It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation.

The area inside the Arctic Circle contains 8 percent of the earth’s surface and 15 percent of its land…. The Arctic produces 40 percent of the world’s palladium, 20 percent of its diamonds, 15 percent of its platinum, 11 percent of its cobalt, 10 percent of its nickel, 9 percent of its tungsten, and 8 percent of its zinc.

Alaska itself is an unusual state.

I started traveling in the Arctic in 1991, so I experienced the ice in winter and spring. The seasonal sea ice, it has a long season. It starts in September and ends in June.

Anybody I'd spoken to who'd been in Siberia said 'would you please put mosquitos in your film,' that's what everybody knows about, they're big and they're nasty.

The Arctic has huge glaciers, frozen waterfalls and floating ice. This is scenery on which man has left no mark, which has stayed unchanged for centuries, wild, bleak, hauntingly beautiful; it is a part of God's creation we have made no effort to tame.

A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.

Cold is not without its risks to runners, of course, especially ones who don't head south when winter visits their neighborhood. Even pooh-pooh-ers of frozen lungs and lovers of dark jogs over permafrost have been known to be careful about certain hazards.

I hear from my Inuit and Yupik relatives up north that everything has changed. It's so hot; there is not enough winter. Animals are confused. Ice is melting.

We have no choice: we must protect Arctic ice, enable it to continue to act as an essential temperature regulator for the planet, avoid the catastrophic rise in sea levels that would result from the ice melt, and stop the disappearance of permafrost releasing irreversible quantities of greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.

The whole band is from Alaska. It's like growing up anywhere else.

Siberia is a state of mind.

People have known for thousands of years that oil was abundant on Alaska's North Slope, a vast tundra, flat and treeless, on and on and on, from the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range to the Arctic Ocean, an endless, unchanging landscape bigger than Idaho.

A person can't just drive around the North Slope, visit the locals, stop in at a burger joint. There are no locals, no burger joints, no houses, no cities, no churches.

Looking at the map of the Russian Federation, one can see a country covering mostly northern areas; today more than 70 percent of our territory is or can be referred to as northern, if not the Far North. We have a rather small warm Black sea strip in the South and - to tell the truth - quite a few regions with a hospitable warm climate.