Four years ago, Morris J. Alexie had to move out of the house his father built in Alaska in 1969 because it was sinking into the earth and water was starting to seep through the floor.
“The mudflats are appearing between houses throughout our community. There are currently seven occupied houses and even they are very tilted and sunk into the ground,” Alexie said by phone from Nunapitchuk, a village of about 600 residents. “Everything is bogging down.”
What was once a grassy tundra is now gushing water. The region where he lives is being crisscrossed with boards just over a meter long that the community uses to get from one place to another. And even some boards have already begun to sink. “It looks like the tundra is full of polka dots, which are puddles. Before we had grass throughout our community. Now it has turned into a big swamp.”
The thawing of permafrost — the long-frozen layer of ground that has supported the arctic tundra and boreal forests of Alaska, Canada and Russia for millennia — is threatening the livelihoods of people like Alexie. It is also dramatically transforming the polar landscape, now dotted with huge puddles, newly formed or drained lakes, collapsing coastlines and fire damage.
Overlooked and Underrated
It’s not just the 3.6 million people who live in polar regions who have to worry about thawing.
Everyone needs it – especially the climate policy leaders and policymakers from nearly 200 countries who are now in Egypt for COP 27, the UN’s annual climate summit.
The vast amount of carbon stored in the northernmost corners of our planet is an overlooked and underestimated driver of the climate crisis. The frozen ground has an estimated 1.7 billion metric tons of carbon — about 51 times the amount of carbon the world released as fossil fuel emissions in 2019, according to NASA. The activity could be emitting as much greenhouse gas as Japan.
Thawing permafrost gets less attention than shrinking glaciers and ice sheets, but scientists say that needs to change — and soon.
“Permafrost is like the dirty cousin of ice sheets. It’s a buried phenomenon. Nobody sees him. It is covered in vegetation and dirt,” explained Merritt Turetsky, director of the Arctic and Alpine Research Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. “But it’s down there. We know it’s there. And it has an equally important impact on the global climate.”
The problem is particularly urgent because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has disrupted many scientific partnerships, meaning a potential loss of access to essential data and knowledge about the region.
Warmer summers – the Arctic is warming four times faster than the global average – have weakened and deepened the top or active layer of permafrost, which thaws in summer and freezes in winter.
Thawing awakens microbes in the soil that feed on organic matter, allowing the release of methane and carbon dioxide from the soil and atmosphere. In addition, it can also pave the way for methane to rise from reservoirs deep in the
Earth.
“Permafrost has basically served as the planet’s freezer for ancient biomass,” Turetsky compared. “When these creatures and organisms died, their biomass was incorporated into these frozen layers of soil and preserved throughout the lifespan.
time”.
As the permafrost thaws, often in complex ways that are not clearly understood, the freezer lid opens. Scientists like Turetsky are doubling down on efforts to understand what these changes will bring.
The element of surprise in the weather
Permafrost is a very unpredictable surprise element in the climate crisis because it is not yet clear whether carbon emissions from permafrost will be just an extra drop or a devastating addition. The latest estimates suggest that the magnitude of carbon emissions from permafrost by the end of this century could be equal to or greater than current emissions from major fossil fuel-emitting countries.
“There is some scientific uncertainty about the size of this comparison country. However, if we take a high-emissions scenario, this could be as big or bigger than the United States,” said Brendan Rogers, associate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts.
The American expert described permafrost as a sleeping giant, whose impacts are still unclear.
“We’re just talking about a huge amount of carbon. We don’t expect everything to thaw out, because some layers are very deep and would take hundreds or thousands of years to do that,” Rogers said. “But even if a tiny fraction of that number is admitted to the atmosphere, that’s very important.”
Projections of cumulative carbon emissions from permafrost from 2022 to 2100 range from 99 gigatons to 550 gigatons. By comparison, the United States currently emits 368 gigatons of carbon, according to an article published in
September in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
“Abrupt thawing”
Not all climate change models that governments use to make their already bleak predictions these days include projected thawing emissions. Even those who use them imagine they will be gradual, Rogers said.
The researcher and other scientists are concerned about the prevalence of abrupt or rapid thawing in regions of permafrost, which has the power to shock the landscape to release much more carbon than just gradual warming from the top down.
The traditional view of permafrost thawing is that it is a process that exposes the parts slowly, but the “abrupt thawing” is exposing deep permafrost layers more quickly in many ways.
One example is Alaska’s Big Trail Lake, a newly formed lake that “burps” bubbles of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) that come from thawing permafrost beneath the lake’s water. Methane can prevent such lakes from refreezing in winter,
exposing deeper permafrost to warmer temperatures and degradation.
The scientist from the Woodwell Climate Research Center also says that the rapid thawing of permafrost also happens along with intense forest fires that have crossed parts of Siberia in recent years. Sometimes these flames burn silently underground for months, long after the above ground fire has been extinguished, giving them the nickname “zombie”.
“The fires themselves burn off some of the active layer (of permafrost), setting the ground on fire and releasing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide,” Rogers detailed. “But this combusted soil was also insulating, keeping the permafrost cool in the summer. When it disappears, much deeper active layers emerge and can lead to greater emissions in the following decades.”
Also very worrying is the sudden appearance of about 20 perfectly cylindrical craters in the far north of Siberia in the last 10 years. At tens of meters in diameter, they may have been caused by a buildup and explosion of methane — a previously unknown geological phenomenon that has taken many permafrost scientists by surprise and could represent a new escape route for methane previously contained deep within the earth.
“The Arctic is heating up very quickly and crazy things are happening,” he said.
War is a disaster for science
The lack of monitoring and data on the behavior of permafrost, which covers 15% of the Northern Hemisphere’s exposed land surface, means scientists still have only a patchwork quilt, a localized understanding of rapid thawing and how it contributes to global warming. and affects people living in permafrost regions.
At the Woodwell Climate Research Center, scientist Rogers is part of a new $41 million initiative funded by a group of billionaires called the Audacious Project to understand thawing. The project aims to coordinate a pan-Arctic carbon monitoring network to fill some data gaps that have made it difficult to incorporate thawing emissions from permafrost into climate targets.
The project’s first carbon flow tower, which tracks the flow of methane and carbon dioxide from the ground into the atmosphere, was installed this summer in Churchill, in the Canadian province of Manitoba. However, plans to install similar monitoring stations in Siberia are in disarray because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“It has always been more challenging to work in Russia than in other countries, like Canada, for example,” confided Rogers. “But the invasion, of course, made it exponentially more challenging.”
Sebastian Dötterl, a professor and soil scientist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich, who studies how warmer air and soil temperatures alter the growth of plants in the Arctic, managed to travel to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic last year. summer, to collect soil and plant samples.
However, the cost of the field trip was double what was initially budgeted because the group was banned from using any Russian-owned infrastructure, forcing the team to hire a tour boat and reorganize their itinerary. But Dotterl said
that the most pressing issue is that he is no longer able to interact with his peers in Russian institutions.
“We are now dividing a very small community of experts around the world into political groups that are disconnected, whereas our problems are global and must be linked,” he said.
Turetsky agreed, saying the war in Ukraine has been “a disaster for our scientific enterprise”.
“Russia and Siberia are huge players. Many of the US and EU-funded projects for work in Siberia with some sort of lateral knowledge sharing have all been cancelled.”
“Shall we stop trying? No of course not. There’s a lot we can do with existing data and global remote sensing products. But this was a real setback for the scientific community.”
🇧🇷Posted by Daniel Reis
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
