Thawing Arctic will reveal more mummified creatures and bring new risks for those still living

A near-perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth in Yukon is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, when it comes to finding prehistoric creatures long buried in the Arctic permafrost.

But for scientists, those discoveries can feel like a double-edged sword — coming as climate change and human activities thaw and carve away the ground that's been frozen for thousands of years.

In recent decades, many discoveries of ancient remains in North America, including that of the baby mammoth Nun cho ga, were made due to mining.

"Without the mining activities, it would be really difficult for us to study the permafrost," said Thomas Opel, a climate researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, who was in the Klondike area last month to scope future research sites.

Mining carves out areas of permafrost that researchers such as Opel can study to better understand climate cycles going back 100,000 years. But if not properly maintained, those dug-up areas might be of no further use.

"Sometimes it breaks my heart a bit to see these wasted landscapes," Opel said.

Similar prehistoric discoveries in Siberia have come as a result of crews blasting the permafrost and digging enormous tunnels to uncover mammoth tusks — many of them destined for China, where demand for mammoth ivory has soared since a 2017 ban on elephant ivory.

The tusk hunters, who are often excavating illegally, tend to discard other parts they uncover, said Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Stockholm University in Sweden.

"These tunneling operations tend to generate very large amounts of [ancient] bones and teeth that are simply just carried out because they're in the way, and thrown in a big pile outside and left there," he said. "So for us, it is valuable to be able to go there and sample [the bones and teeth] for DNA analysis."

Dalén was part of the team that studied a pair of mummified prehistoric lion cubs found by tusk hunters in Russian permafrost four years ago. He also recently helped confirm that an 18,000-year-old puppy with fur and whiskers still intact was a wolf, not a dog.

He said the hunters' tunnels can give geologists an opportunity to study permafrost from the inside, if they're granted access — but they also cause great damage to the local environment.

"It basically removes the permafrost. After a couple of years, these tunnels will thaw to the extent that they collapse, and then the entire area where they have been doing tunneling will slump and then be washed into the river."

However, scientists say climate change poses a far greater risk to the permafrost than smaller-scale human activities.

Temperatures in the Arctic are rising much faster than the rest of the planet: Parts of Yukon and the Northwest Territories smashed heat records with temperatures above 31 C earlier this month, while a Siberian town topped 38 C last December.