Dr Duane Froese - From ancient DNA to geotechnical engineering: Diverse research from Canada's first Permafrost Archives Laboratory

Permafrost is the most exceptional material for the preservation of past environments on the planet. This past month the million year genome record was broken, eclipsing our earlier record of ca. 700,000 years that had stood for nearly a decade. New work on permafrost has confirmed its great antiquity and the longterm stability of deep permafrost; though as we increasingly move to a non-analogue warmer world this stability seems less secure. In this presentation I will discuss recent developments reconstructing past environments from relict permafrost, including the development of targeted enrichment approaches using the PaleoChip Arctic for ancient environmental DNA. As well as the insights this work has for the paleoecology of Beringia, and new prospects in permafrost science with the building of the Permafrost Archives Science Laboratory at the University of Alberta.