Florida draws plenty of headlines for its sinkholes, particularly when they swallow cars or entire houses. But Florida's sinkhole risk pales in comparison to Alaska's.

Much of Alaska's soil consists of permafrost – ground that stays below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) for at least two consecutive years. This ground is often rich in ice, and when that ice melts, the land above can collapse. As temperatures climb, such collapses are occurring more frequently across the Arctic.

The consequences mirror those in Florida: substantial property damage as the terrain beneath buildings, roads, and pipelines gives way. The stakes are considerable: permafrost underlies roughly a quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere, including many Arctic communities where roads, pipelines, and buildings were engineered on the assumption that the ground beneath them would stay frozen.

Despite the high potential for damage, up-to-date maps of permafrost thaw that could help Arctic residents and community leaders prepare remain rare. To close that gap, a team led by hydrologists and data scientists built an interactive website that tracks permafrost thaw across the Arctic in near-real time, exploiting a unique feature of the Arctic's own version of the sinkhole.

Clear signs of permafrost thaw

There is no way to directly measure permafrost without digging into it, but there are telltale signs. When ice-rich permafrost thaws, the ground surface subsides, forming what are known as thermokarst ponds – depressions that fill with water. Much of the Arctic is now dotted with ponds and lakes created this way, as regional temperatures rise at two to three times the global average rate.

These lakes are easy to identify in satellite imagery, and watching how they evolve over time offers clues about how the permafrost beneath them is changing.

When big lakes disappear overnight

Sometimes the same process that triggers the sinkhole carves new stream channels that drain a lake entirely, leaving behind a circular basin of bare ground. A lake several hundred meters long may have taken a millennium to form, yet permafrost thaw set off by a single unusually warm summer can drain it completely in just a few hours.

When a lake vanishes abruptly, that is a strong indicator that ice-rich permafrost has thawed. Disappearing lakes also offer a practical way to monitor permafrost across wide areas and pinpoint where thawing is most active.

Aerial photographs beginning in the late 1940s and satellite imagery available since the 1970s have allowed scientists to reconstruct what the Arctic's permafrost landscapes looked like in the past, including where permafrost lakes existed and where they did not.

Using artificial intelligence, scientists can now rapidly analyze fresh imagery from across vast swaths of the Arctic for signs of permafrost change, such as new ponds appearing or old ones disappearing. The approach reflects a broader shift in permafrost research: with a region too vast and remote for field surveys alone, machine analysis of satellite data has become a primary tool for tracking landscape change at pan-Arctic scale.

An international team of scientists collaborating through the Permafrost Discovery Gateway has mapped and now actively monitors more than 4 million lakes across the Arctic, including 70 million thermokarst ponds – also called trough ponds – across the Alaska tundra.

Detecting signs of permafrost thaw in these landscapes helps communities plan for environmental change. The new maps can show where land sits above ice-rich permafrost, signaling poor choices for building sites, and where the frozen ground contains less ice, likely indicating safer ground for construction.

Permafrost changes underway in 2026

The Seward and Baldwin peninsulas in northwestern Alaska are hot spots for sudden lake drainage. Over the past two decades, the region has lost many large lakes that had blanketed its landscape for thousands of years. In the summer of 2018 alone, nearly 200 of the region's roughly 4,600 lakes lost more than a quarter of their area after an unusually warm winter.

Although the winter of 2025-26 was on the cold side for Alaska, the region continued to lose lake area – evidence that points to ongoing permafrost thaw. The team identified around 30 additional lakes affected by drainage in June and July 2026.

This process plays out with hundreds of lakes across the Arctic every summer, particularly in June and July. Not all lake changes, however, stem from permafrost thaw. Lakes in floodplains and wetlands, for example, commonly shift dramatically from season to season because of the abundance of spring snowmelt. Wildlife can also play a role: beavers, for instance, can recreate a lake after it abruptly drains by damming the newly formed drainage channels.

Living with permafrost thaw

In the past, information about where permafrost was changing came mostly from scientific studies published years after the fact. With near-real-time data now available, researchers can study thaw processes more closely, and communities can obtain current insights into permafrost conditions before planning new construction – and learn where problems are likely to arise. For scientists studying the Arctic's carbon cycle, the same monitoring matters beyond construction planning: permafrost soils store large amounts of frozen organic carbon, and thaw exposes that material to decomposition. What to watch next is whether near-real-time lake tracking can be extended to other thaw indicators – such as ground subsidence and coastal erosion – to build a fuller picture of how the frozen North is changing.

Anna Liljedahl, Affiliated Professor in Arctic Hydrology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Ingmar Nitze, Postdoctoral Researcher in Polar Geoscience, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.