Scientists feared unstoppable emissions from melting permafrost. They may have already started.
Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases an Arctic Report Card, detailing the state of the frozen world at the top of the globe.
And each year, its findings grow more dire. This year, the report revealed that the Arctic itself may now be contributing to climate change.
That’s because Arctic soil contains a lot of carbon, which would stay there if the planet wasn’t warming. As the frozen ground across the Arctic starts to thaw, it releases that carbon, which turns into a greenhouse gas. Some of that carbon gets taken up by plants growing in the summertime, but more and more of it is now escaping into the atmosphere.
“Thawing permafrost throughout the Arctic could be releasing an estimated 300-600 million tons of net carbon per year to the atmosphere,” the NOAA writes in the report. That’s roughly the equivalent of Japan’s annual emissions.
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Across the northern landscape of Siberia, rapidly thawing permafrost is driving people from their homes; entire neighborhoods are falling into rising rivers, arable land is declining, and the herding of cattle and reindeer is becoming more difficult due to the destruction of pasture land, according to Anton Troianovski and Chris Mooney of the Independent. What’s more, melting permafrost across the Arctic is releasing methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which will accelerate global warming, scientists say.
As Alaska permafrost melts, roads sink, bridges tilt and greenhouse gases escape
Alaska’s Arctic landscape is under assault from a warming climate, and it’s happening a lot faster than anticipated.
Melting permafrost may make oil production nearly impossible on the North Slope
In a few decades oil companies may be scrambling to reconstruct sagging pipeline supports and propping up the gravel foundations under big oilfield processing plants as the tundra land surface turns to goo. The slope’ oil operators face a long-term, existential threat to infrastructure for which there is no easy solution – thawing permafrost.
Scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks have been taking deep temperature measurements in permafrost soils underlying the producing oilfields on the slope and along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. Since 1978, when measurements began, temperatures at the 65-foot depth have shown steady warming with the steepest increase at 6 degrees F in the oil fields at the northern end of TAPS.
In 1978 the permafrost at 65 feet near the Prudhoe Bay was about -16 degrees F. By 2018 it had warmed to 22.5 degrees F.
That's not exactly good news, but I'll take it under the circumstances.
Jun 26, 2019 - Every summer as the Arctic warms up, seasonal highways open on the ocean, allowing sea ice to migrate southward and melt. Now, satellite data is revealing that the gateway to one critical highway—the Nares Strait dividing northwest Greenland and Canada's Ellesmere Island—has broken up months ahead of schedule.
Greenland's 'unusual' melting sea ice