Duane Froese is in a race to preserve precious evidence of ancient life trapped in the Yukon's warming permafrost.
"Permafrost is the most exceptional material on the planet for the preservation of past life," he says. But as the Arctic permafrost begins to thaw in a rapidly warming climate, "the worry is that at some point these records will not exist, so it's become imperative to preserve them."
Over the past two decades at a site in the territory's Klondike region, the geologist in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has collected more than 3,000 kilograms of permafrost cores dating back nearly 700,000 years — the second-oldest samples ever recovered in North America. This spring Froese's team, along with colleagues from McMaster University, collected several thousand kg of core samples, including some of the oldest in the northern hemisphere.
A single gram of frozen soil contains billions of fragments of DNA from plants, animals and microbes that lived long ago, including those of Steppe Mammoths, their Woolly Mammoth descendants and ancestors of the modern horse.
Froese is preserving his samples in the University of Alberta's PACS Laboratory — Canada's first integrated permafrost research facility and the only one of its kind in the world — containing 1.5 kilometres of core samples.
Froese notes that scientists' ability to extract DNA from the samples has "improved exponentially" — which makes them a treasure trove of vital clues to how ancient life emerged and evolved.
