A substantial challenge with permafrost is in understanding what drives the microbial communities which drive greenhouse gas production, and are implicated both in very large GHG emissions in the past, such as methane in the latest Pleistocene, and modern GHG emissions. In this paper, from Alireza’s PhD (in microbiology co-supervised with Brian Lanoil), we look at the relict microbial communities in permafrost from the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. We see substantial community changes across the boundary, not surprising given the Quaternary extinctions and ecosystem reorganization that occurred at that time. We chalk it up to the changes in edaphic properties, particularly the nature of the host sediments and their edaphic properties that changed as a result of climate and ecosystem changes. Importantly though, at this site, there was not a record of thermokarst (abrupt physical permafrost change across the boundary).
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2020.00133/full