This tadpole-shaped gash in the Earth's surface - around one kilometre long, and 800 metres wide - is enlarging by up to 30 metres a year.

Unique paleontological sites are facing destruction from gangs seeking to sell prehistoric remains. The hunters are especially active in late summer, when the permafrost retreats leaving mammoth remains more visible.

A recent study estimates permafrost coverage on the peninsula has decreased by 60 percent since 1950. Permafrost is usually associated with Northern and Interior Alaska, but it also occurs in isolated pockets in wetlands on the Kenai Peninsula.

As Alaska warms and permafrost thaws, the chemistry of the Yukon River's water is transforming chemically, new research from the U.S. Geological Survey shows.

A new study has warned of the risk to buildings in urban areas across Russia's permafrost zone caused by climate change. The Russian-US analysis says a worst-case scenario could lead to a 75-95% 'reduction in bearing capacity throughout the permafrost region by 2050'.

Decades have passed and ponds are drying up.

A mysterious anthrax outbreak over the summer killed more than 2,300 reindeer and at least one child.

Freak warm weather followed by a freeze in winter 2013-14 caused an ice-over of pastures which led to the deaths of some 70,000 reindeer in a famine. This summer, there was an outbreak of deadly anthrax after the hottest Arctic summer on record.

Ponds in and around the Nome area are drying up.

There was a town where up to 40% of the population died. Naturally, the bodies were buried under the upper layer of permafrost soil, on the bank of the Kolyma River. Now, a little more than 100 years later, Kolyma's floodwaters have started eroding the banks.'

Downriver from Arctic Village

State and North Slope Borough officials say Point Lay’s drinking water lake was wiped out by the nearby Kokolik River, which flooded and eroded the lake banks.

A critical artery is threatened by thawing permafrost.

Russian officials have said the death of a 12-year-old boy, a member of a reindeer-herding family from the Yamal tundra 1,300 miles north of Moscow, was the first fatality in Siberia linked to the pathogen since 1941. Twenty others have been diagnosed with anthrax.

Melted permafrost that exposed an infected reindeer carcass is believed to have resulted in the cases that killed a 12-year-boy and sickened eight others.

Seventy-two nomadic herders, including 41 children, were hospitalised in far north Russia after the region began experiencing abnormally high temperatures

Possibly an effect of thawing permafrost.

Climate-induced habitat changes on Alaska's North Slope such as coastal erosion and permafrost thaw have produced more food for migrating brant, a study says.