From The Guardian:
Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.
A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia...
Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.
These people have a very one-dimensional view of things and show no interest in what things were like millennia ago.
Ask yourself, "What is permafrost?". From Wiki:
In geology, permafrost is ground, including rock or (cryotic) soil, with a temperature that remains at or below the freezing point of water 0 °C (32 °F) for two or more years.
Most permafrost is located in high latitudes (in and around the Arctic and Antarctic regions), but at lower latitudes alpine permafrost occurs at higher elevations. Ground ice is not always present, as may be in the case of non-porous bedrock, but it frequently occurs and it may be in amounts exceeding the potential hydraulic saturation of the ground material.
Permafrost accounts for 0.022% of total water on Earth and the permafrost region covers 24% of exposed land in the Northern Hemisphere. It also occurs subsea on the continental shelves of the continents surrounding the Arctic Ocean, portions of which were exposed during the last glacial period.
To cut a long story short, areas which supported plant life in earlier, warmer times created the soil in which the plants grew, which created more soil etc. This soil gradually froze over at some stage in the past, the vegetation died and rotted away, hence the methane trapped in it.
There's no hard dividing line between 'soil which is still warm enough to support plant life' and 'soil which isn't'. If the latter category warms up a bit, after a couple of years, it will be normal soil with normal vegetation again. We've got to assume that normal soil with normal vegetation isn't some catastrophe-inducing, methane-belching horror, or else there'd be far more methane in the atmosphere than there is (about 2 parts per million).
So sorry, I see nothing to panic about. The methane emitting phase is just a brief awkward teenage phase while soil moves from being frozen to supporting plant life again.
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