The effort resulted in the announcement (on 5 October 2005) that the group had successfully determined the virus's genetic sequence, using historic tissue samples recovered by pathologist Johan Hultin from a female flu victim buried in the Alaskan permafrost and samples preserved from American soldiers.
In the late 1990s, a team of scientists led by Johan Hultin exhumed the body of an Inuit woman who had been buried in the permafrost in a gravesite near Brevig Mission in an attempt to recover RNA of the 1918 influenza virus (Spanish flu) that killed her.
These bacterial cells were discovered in a tunnel dug by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960s in order to allow scientists to study the permafrost in preparation for the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
Al Gore cited drunken trees caused by melting permafrost in Alaska as evidence of global warming, as part of his presentation in the 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth.
Heat pipes are also used to keep the permafrost frozen alongside parts of the Qinghai–Tibet Railway where the embankment and track absorb the sun's heat.
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For example, in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System residual ground heat remaining in the oil as well as heat produced by friction and turbulence in the moving oil could conduct down the pipe's support legs and melt the permafrost on which the supports are anchored.
Walter's research focuses on methane and carbon dioxide emissions from arctic and temperate lakes and wetlands in Alaska and Siberia, and the processes involved in greenhouse gas emissions from lakes, including thermokarst (permafrost thaw), industrial plant emissions, geology, and changes in lake area.
In February 2012, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that scientists had grown plants from 30,000-year-old Silene stenophylla fruit, which was stored in squirrel burrows near the banks of the Kolyma river and preserved in permafrost.
Permafrost covered Europe south of the ice sheet down to present-day Szeged in Southern Hungary.
In collaboration with Dr. Terry Chapin and Dr. Katey Walter-Anthony, Sergei Zimov has published a series a collection of scientific papers exposing the importance of permafrost and high-latitude carbon dioxide and methane emissions in the global carbon cycle.
Thermokarst is a land surface characterised by very irregular surfaces of marshy hollows and small hummocks formed as ice-rich permafrost thaws, that occurs in Arctic areas, and on a smaller scale in mountainous areas such as the Himalayas and the Swiss Alps.