A Discontinuous Earth is a study into different ways of knowing permafrost. As permafrost begins to receive more attention through Anthropocene scholarship and climate change discourse, defining permafrost becomes contextualised through strategies to mitigate its thaw. Thawing permafrost has grave implications for the survival of humanity: it sequesters double the amount of carbon currently found in the atmosphere, which escapes when it thaws, exacerbating global warming. In north-east Siberia, an ambitious project is underway to slow, or even reverse, the dangerous effects of thawing permafrost; called Pleistocene Park, two scientists are attempting to restore a large patch of tundra to the prehistoric ‘mammoth steppe’ ecosystem. Having plucked various animals from all over the globe – bison, horse, reindeer, yak – they are now turning their attention to the controversial science of de-extinction in the hopes that they might return a mammoth to its ancestral home – a natural geoengineering scheme they claim will ‘save the world’.

This project draws on fieldwork undertaken at the Pleistocene Park and other areas of Yakutia, Russia to excavate permafrost in all its difference, multiplicity, and surprise. Throughout,  I present a new theory of ‘discontinuous thinking’. Taking inspiration from the scientific definition of permafrost as either continuous or discontinuous, discontinuous thinking aims to disrupt the presumption of human mastery in the Anthropocene, which  designates inhuman matter to be extracted, ontological difference suppressed, scientific knowledge valorised as pure, life to be controllable, time to be quantifiable and malleable. Discontinuous thinking, conversely, unsettles these homogenising categories by using permafrost as a way to uncover the discontinuity of both the Earth and the earth. Weaving together various stories across different places and spaces and temporalities, A Discontinuous Earth produces a materially and textually incomplete account of knowing permafrost and planet in all its maddening, fascinating discontinuity.