Rivers of mud stream off the exposed permafrost, cracking and dripping in the 20 Celsius late-summer heat. Enormous ice wedges that have grown metres long over the eons protrude from the top of the bluff like giant fangs.
"Is this cool or what?" asks Scott Dallimore of the Geological Survey of Canada as he scrambles out of a helicopter in his hip waders. He heads for the steel grey bluff to take a closer look. But the melted permafrost is like quicksand and stops him in his tracks.
"We first found this exposure two years ago," says Dallimore. The contorted pattern of the exposed permafrost suggests it might be hundreds of thousands of years old.
"It's been frozen like this forever."
But not for long.
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