Ice as a Counter-Archive: Permafrost, Archival Melt and Climate Futures

In the history of Canadian Arctic colonization, ice and permafrost have been understood primarily as an engineering problem. During the Cold War however, understanding of permafrost and its possibilities changed. Microbiologists and geoscientists did not see permafrost as a hindrance, but rather for understanding the past. As permafrost freezes, organics, air and water become trapped, and as the permafrost grows thicker, so too the earliest trapped matter is buried deeper. Through chemical and genomic analysis, permafrosttoday can reveal details about the past. For scientists today, permafrost has collected, ordered and preserved a lost world of climate environments. This paper examines how political imperatives, petroleum industry and government scientists worked together in the 20th century Canadian North to construct permafrost as an archive of the past. It also posits that these icy (and now rapidly melting) archives should play a critical role in our global future.