Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood

Climate scientists point to permafrost as a "ticking time bomb" for the planet, and from the Arctic, apocalyptic narratives proliferate on the devastating effects permafrost thaw poses to human survival. In Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood, Charlotte Wrigley considers how permafrost – and its disappearance – redefines extinction to be a lack of continuity, both material and social, and something that affects not only life on earth but nonlife, too.

Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood approaches the topic of thawing permafrost and the wild new economies and mitigation strategies forming in the far north through a study of the Sakha Republic, Russia's largest region, and its capital city Yakutsk, which is the coldest city in the world and built on permafrost. Wrigley examines people who are creating commerce out of thawing permafrost, including scientists wishing to recreate the prehistoric "Mammoth steppe" ecosystem by eventually rewilding resurrected woolly mammoths, Indigenous people who forage the tundra for exposed mammoth bodies to sell their tusks, and government officials hoping to keep their city standing as the ground collapses under it. Warming begets thawing begets economic activity – and as a result, permafrost becomes discontinuous, both as land and as a social category, in ways that have implications for the entire planet. Discontinuity, Wrigley shows, eventually evolves into extinction.

Offering a new way of defining extinction through the concept of "discontinuity", Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood presents a meditative and story-focused engagement with permafrost as more than just frozen ground.

Preface
Introduction: Permafrost Life

1. Earth
A Global Permafrost Apocalypse
Permafrost Science at the Pleistocene Park
The Pleistocene Park as Planetary Redemption
Chersky and the Mainland
Permafrost Ruptures and Island Apocalypses
Reimagining the Planetary
The Lives All Around

2. Ice
Yakutian Refrigerators
The Antipermafrost and Extinction in the Permafrost Tunnel
The Permafrost Law and Inhuman Subjectivity
Does Permafrost Breathe?
Permafrost as Commodity and the Hunt for White Gold
Unearthing Multiplicity through Stories
The Lives Underfoot

3. Bone
Permafrost Underground and the Verticality of Time
Deep Pasts: The Super-terrestrial with(out) Humans
Shallow Histories: The Soviet Union and the Genesis of the Pleistocene Park
(Re)emergent Landscapes and the Intricacies of Reproduction
Animal Agencies and Skeletal Afterlives
The Subterranean as a Future Repository
The Lives Coming Back

4. Blood
Mammoth Histories
(Un)broken Lineages and Blood Ties
Entering the Cryobank
The Cryopolitics of Future Life
Immortality and Resurrection in the Secular Age
Giving Up on Life
The Lives of the Future

Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index