The Variability of Permafrost Properties

Mapping the permafrost properties is actually really challenging because there's this very large variability in the properties of the subsoil. You have this massive variability below ground that you sometimes don't really see a surface expression of, so that you can't really tell from the soil surface what is happening below ground. In general, we can say that the warming penetrates relatively slowly,. It takes decades to even century sometimes for the permaf frost temperatures to really catch up with changes in atmospheric temperature.