The story of permafrost — ground that remains frozen for at least two years — is often framed as a crisis, with its sudden thaw seen as an existential threat to all earthlings. Yet, this narrative obscures a deeper, long-standing struggle—one in which states have sought to transform permafrost into a stable infrastructure for colonial-extractive projects, despite its resistance to control.
For decades, planners, engineers, and state officials have pursued extractive ambitions in the Arctic, envisioning permafrost as a fixed, governable substrate. However, permafrost has never been a passive layer of land. Rather, it continuously responds to environmental shifts and material interventions by wreaking all sorts of havoc.
This paper examines what it means to live with such recurring breakdowns, drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Barentsburg, a Soviet-Russian mining town on Svalbard. Following permafrost scientists, engineers, state officials, and local residents, Anastasiya Halauniova explores their efforts to "control" permafrost behavior and stabilise it—often against all odds. In particular, she focuses on practices of engaging (and at times refusing to engage) with permafrost, shaped by political crises, state violence, and economic scarcity.
By tracing how people in Barentsburg navigate, adapt to, and sometimes surrender to permafrost’s unpredictability, she reveals how frozen and thawing ground actively shapes Arctic landscapes, rendering them sites of both extraction and fragility.