In Inuvik, Canada, the new Royal Canadian Mounted Police station was built with thermosiphons to keep the permafrost below it frozen. The school has stabilizing pipes drilled 20 meters deep into the ground. No one wants to repeat what happened to the prison for teenage girls, which sank into the earth years ago.

But they may not have a choice. A recent study published by Nature Climate Change suggests that even if the world manages to stabilize global warming to 2ºC above preindustrial levels, the amount of permafrost around the globe will decrease by 40 percent—20 percent more than previous estimates. “We invested a great deal of resources in building infrastructure at high latitudes,” Ken Shaefer at the National Snow and Ice Data Center told me in a recent interview. “Roads, bridges, pipelines, railroads, buildings, all built on the assumption that the permafrost will remain stable.”  

Instead, permafrost has warmed by roughly a degree Celsius per decade for the last 40 years, in some places turning what was once a mixture of soil and ice as tough as concrete into mud. Dwindling sea ice and degrading permafrost erodes coastlines; in Alaska, dozens of coastal villages are considering relocation. In communities like Inuvik, the ground might shift, collapse, and in rare cases, even form canyons like the half-mile-wide Batagaika crater in Siberia. “You’re pretty much losing the solid earth under you,” says Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysics professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “You can have one edge of your house lower by three feet.”

For a landscape so tied into the effects of climate change, Canada’s north is extraordinarily remote. In Nunavut, there are no roads to southern provinces. Other towns can be reached by car only during the winter, using ice roads. It’s cheapest to transport building supplies by sea, but shipments happen infrequently and solely in summer months. “You can rent very large aircraft to bring stuff in, but that becomes prohibitively expensive,” says planner and engineer Ken Johnson, who has worked with indigenous villages in the Arctic since the 1980s.

Johnson says that the Canadian government has indeed investigated what the future of northern territories will look like. “They’ve tried to do climate change adaptation plans in the majority of communities across the Canadian north,” he explains. “But if you don’t have a champion for it, it gets put on the shelf.”

In 2016, the federal government committed about $8.5 million dollars in 11 infrastructure projects in the Northwest Territories (NWT), ranging from fire-station expansions to road upgrades. But the money needed for the NWT to deal with future permafrost thaw will outstrip the territory’s coffers.

Predicting exactly how to deal with that future thaw is tricky because every patch of frozen earth is a little different. Some permafrost is colder. Some is icier. In Tuktoyaktuk, near the Beaufort Sea, the permafrost is hundreds of meters thick. In Yellowknife, it’s scattered shallowly through the area in small, frozen islands.

These factors affect how the landscape looks after warming. A recent study from the Northwest Territories Geological Survey mapped new craters formed by permafrost thaw throughout 1.3 million square kilometers of northwestern Canada. They found the most craters in especially ice-rich permafrost—as the large ice chunks in the ground melted, the dirt collapsed around it like a fallen souffle.

Steve Kokelj, lead scientist on the geological survey, says that’s why anyone building or maintaining new infrastructure needs to analyze not only the site as it is now but also as it will be in the future. “A lot of these communities were built ad hoc,” Kokelj says. “I don’t know that in the '70s and '60s people were necessarily thinking about environmental change, and certainly not climate change.” Information about a town’s underlying permafrost usually exists from past industry or government projects but is often hard to find. Kokelj and his office are creating a permafrost database to collect and house that information.

“If it’s put together, and it's publicly accessible, it could paint a really helpful and useful picture of the conditions under a community,” Kokelj says. “If you’re moving forward to make decisions about ‘do we build, where do we build, what techniques do we use,' that picture becomes very, very important.”

Building in the North has always been a challenge. Construction seasons are short, materials are limited, and weather can be poor. Just as the territories have adapted to building in one harsh landscape, they have to adapt to building in another, even more unpredictable one. “Permafrost is a way of life here,” said Sara Brown, CEO of the NWT Association of Communities, when we spoke recently. “As far as loss of life of infrastructure, we’re looking at something in the order of $1.3 billion. We’re a little jurisdiction. Just over 100,000 people. That’s a lot of money.”

Still, nobody lives in the Northwest Territories because they like it easy. “Everybody here is pretty resilient,” Brown said. The biggest challenge is planning for a future where the baseline keeps shifting. “It’s going to be tricky to say categorically, we’re on a good path. We don’t even have a sense of how big the problem is.”