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Methane emission hot spots were observed from the air using NASA’s AVIRIS-NG instrument across broad regions of the North American Arctic as part of the agency’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio “When fire burns into permafrost, there are catastrophic changes to the land surface that are different from a fire burning here in California, for example,” said Clayton Elder, co-author and scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which developed AVIRIS-NG. “It’s changing something that was frozen to thawed, and that has a cascading impact on that ecosystem long after the fire.”