{
 "source": "Text: the book’s Chapter 22 as it stood in Solterra’s Cut 25b, before these readings moved here in 25c. NASA’s permafrost-region survey, 2000 to 2020, as named in the book.",
 "sources": [
  "Text: the book’s Chapter 22 as it stood in Solterra’s Cut 25b, before these readings moved here in 25c.",
  "NASA’s permafrost-region survey, 2000 to 2020, as named in the book."
 ],
 "extracted": "2026-09-26, moved out of src/app/ground-under-the-cave/page.tsx unchanged so the page and its download read one file",
 "tables": {
  "AIR_AND_ICE": [
   {
    "gauge": "Carbon dioxide",
    "reading": "Fifty percent above pre-industrial levels, and climbing at a rate the ice cores have not seen in eight hundred thousand years",
    "inBook": "Higher than anything in eight hundred thousand years"
   },
   {
    "gauge": "Methane",
    "reading": "Eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year window",
    "inBook": "Kept"
   },
   {
    "gauge": "Mongolia’s permafrost",
    "reading": "Sixty-three percent of the country underlain in the 1970s; twenty-nine percent today",
    "inBook": "Kept"
   },
   {
    "gauge": "The permafrost region",
    "reading": "NASA’s survey of 2000 to 2020 confirmed it is already a net contributor to global warming: methane from its lakes and wetlands tips the Arctic carbon balance into a source rather than a sink, and the ground releases gas year-round, even in winter",
    "inBook": "Net contributor, year-round"
   },
   {
    "gauge": "The Atlantic current",
    "reading": "One study puts the probability that its collapse is already locked in, unavoidable even if warming stopped today, at ten to twenty-three percent. Iceland has classified it as a national security threat",
    "inBook": "May already be locked in"
   }
  ],
  "PLASTIC": [
   {
    "gauge": "Plastic in the ocean",
    "reading": "Hundreds of millions of metric tons, a garbage truck’s worth entering every minute",
    "inBook": "Moved here"
   },
   {
    "gauge": "Microplastics in people",
    "reading": "Found in human blood, human lungs, human placentas: every placenta tested in 2024 came back positive",
    "inBook": "Blood, lungs, placentas"
   }
  ],
  "BODY": [
   {
    "gauge": "American life expectancy",
    "reading": "Fell three consecutive years beginning in 2015, before the pandemic: deaths of despair, opioids, alcohol, suicide",
    "inBook": "Kept"
   },
   {
    "gauge": "The pandemic",
    "reading": "Dropped it a further two and a half years in two seasons",
    "inBook": "Moved here"
   },
   {
    "gauge": "Obesity",
    "reading": "Two in five American adults clinically obese",
    "inBook": "Moved here"
   },
   {
    "gauge": "Infant and maternal mortality",
    "reading": "The highest of any developed country on the planet",
    "inBook": "Moved here"
   }
  ]
 }
}