Thawing Arctic permafrost is releasing ancient carbon — organic matter frozen since mammoths walked — into the ocean, where microbes wake it into greenhouse gas. Permafrost is an archive; the thaw is that archive beginning to exhale. A bowed bass groans like ice under its own weight, a muted horn speaks through frozen air for the first time in forty thousand years, and the piece warms not toward joy but toward unease — a breath released that can never be re-held.
