How we track permafrost thaw and methane

What the dashboard shows, where the numbers come from, and what they can’t tell you.

The short answer

Permafrost is ground that has stayed frozen for at least two years in a row, often for thousands of years. Northern permafrost holds roughly 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon from plants and animals that never fully decomposed, about twice as much as the atmosphere holds today. As the Arctic warms, nearly four times faster than the planet as a whole, the ground thaws, microbes get to work, and some of that carbon escapes as carbon dioxide and, in wet ground, as methane.

This is a slow feedback, not a “methane bomb”. The permafrost region already emits methane, mostly from wetlands and lakes, and today that is a small share of global emissions. The concern is that it grows steadily for decades as more ground thaws.

How we know

Methane in the air. NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory measures methane in air samples from stations around the world and publishes a global monthly average. Arctic stations, such as Utqiaġvik (Barrow) in Alaska, Alert in Canada and Zeppelin on Svalbard, show how much more methane Arctic air holds than the global average. That surplus points to northern sources, but it cannot tell permafrost apart from wetlands, oil and gas fields or air carried north.

The ground itself. Scientists measure permafrost temperature in boreholes drilled 10 metres or more into the frozen ground, coordinated by the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost. The first global comparison of those records (Biskaborn et al. 2019) found that over 2007–2016 continuous Arctic permafrost warmed by 0.39 °C, Antarctic permafrost by 0.37 °C, and permafrost worldwide by 0.29 °C. The page also shows the yearly records of 20 of the longest-running boreholes, some going back to 1978, from the network’s published data set. Every one of them with a long enough record got warmer.

How much methane the region releases. A 2024 assessment of the whole permafrost region (Hugelius et al.) estimates 20 to 51 million tonnes of methane a year for 2000–2020: the lower figure from measurements of methane in the air, the higher from field data and models scaled up. The world emits about 575 million tonnes a year from all sources, about two-thirds of it from human activity.

How current each part is

Global and Arctic methane: NOAA updates its files monthly; we check every night.
Permafrost warming: a published study covering 2007–2016, and the network’s published borehole records, which end in 2016. The network’s own online database would have newer years, but its data service was not working when we checked (October 2026). When newer records are published we will add them to the ones shown here, not replace them.
Permafrost-region methane: a published assessment covering 2000–2020.
Rusting rivers: NOAA’s Arctic Report Card 2025.

What the dashboard can’t tell you

It cannot say how much of today’s rise in global methane comes from permafrost. The recent acceleration is actively debated: tropical wetlands, agriculture, fossil-fuel leaks, fires and changes in the chemistry that breaks methane down all play a part. Separating them needs isotope measurements, aircraft campaigns and atmospheric models.

It cannot map individual thaw slumps or thaw lakes either. Abrupt thaw is patchy: one ice-rich hillside can collapse while the ground next to it stays stable. Boreholes measure single points; this page gives the broad picture, not a forecast for a particular place.

Credits

The permafrost record exists because field scientists drilled into remote frozen ground and kept going back for decades, the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost brings their measurements together, and NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory runs a methane network precise enough to see changes of a few parts per billion. This dashboard collects and presents their work.