Rising Temperatures and Arctic Infrastructure

It is known that our warming world has many effects on the natural environment, but it also has many effects on humans. Due to climate change and global warming, much of the infrastructure in the arctic circle is under threat. This area of the globe is warming at a pace twice as fast as the global average and the permafrost that covers much of this area is melting. While this releases carbon and methane into the atmosphere, it also has a detrimental effect on the infrastructure. In the arctic circle, there are currently 120,000 buildings, 40,000km of roads, and 9,500km of pipelines currently built on permafrost, and about half of them are expected to be threatened by 2060. This will be both dangerous and costly as the soil beneath these buildings will become liquid and unstable. By 2060 the maintenance bill could exceed 35 billion dollars. While this is a very pressing problem, there are possible solutions. One option is to insulate the ground so that heat can not enter the ground. The second is to extract heat from the ground. Lastly, the third is to reinforce the structures that are built on the permafrost. While these relatively simple options can solve this problem, they will not help if this problem and climate change, in general, is recognized to be a detrimental as it truly is. 

If you want to read more about this you can use this link to The Economist.