Funded by a $980,000 grant from NASA and other research partners, Chemistry Professor J. Houston Miller and two graduate students spent a summer in Fairbanks, Alaska, studying permafrost. There may be as much as 1,000 billion metric tons of carbon in the permafrost ground — and it’s thawing at an accelerated rate, releasing greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Miller’s group constructed a device that uses laser sensors to measure gas concentrations at the ground level, a much more accurate method than the alternative, satellite measurements.