A landscape in motion
North of the Arctic Circle, the Old Crow Flats is a vast wetland of more than 8,000 shallow lakes and ponds spread across 6,170 square kilometers. This landscape sits on a thick layer of continuous permafrost, ground that has remained frozen for millennia. The permafrost here is exceptionally full of ice, structured as massive ice wedges that crisscross the terrain in polygonal patterns. These wedges, some dating back tens of thousands of years, form the structural foundation of the land.
Now, that foundation is melting. As regional temperatures rise, the ice wedges thaw, causing the ground above to collapse. This process, known as thermokarst, is dramatically reshaping the flats. The most startling effect is catastrophic lake drainage. When a melting ice wedge creates a channel, it can breach a lake's shore, causing the entire body of water to drain into a nearby river system in a matter of days or weeks. Between 1951 and 2009, the rate of this drainage increased significantly. The changes are of great concern to the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, the "People of the Lakes," who have inhabited this territory for countless generations and observe the transformations firsthand.
An ice age ecosystem revealed
The Old Crow Flats was part of Beringia, an unglaciated land bridge that connected Asia and North America during the last ice age. Because glaciers never scoured the region, its riverbanks contain one of Canada's largest deposits of ice age fossils. As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, they expose the remains of a lost world.
Paleontologists have recovered millions of fossils from the area, showing the Pleistocene megafauna that once roamed here. Bones from woolly mammoths, steppe bison, giant ground sloths, camels, and several horse species are common finds. Remains of predators like American lions and short-faced bears have also been uncovered. These fossils are isolated bones; some mammoth bones show fracture patterns suggesting they were butchered by early humans between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago. The thawing ground also releases immense stores of ancient carbon, which has been locked in the permafrost for thousands of years. The release of this carbon as greenhouse gases contributes to a climatic feedback loop, a process monitored closely by scientists.