Frozen methane bubbles on the world’s deepest lake shown in stunning video. Irkutsk photographer captures multi-layered columns of bubbles through crystal clear ice. The record heat in #Siberia this summer not only has caused massive fires, but large areas of rapid permafrost melt and resultant ground collapse.… *****Permafrost is thawing rapidly. How much should we worry? Carbon cycle / Methane / Feedback. There are a lot of news stories out here about this article or some variation of it in regards to permafrost THAW (not melt!) and I have some thoughts as a permafrost researcher. /1…
Humanity is on thin ice. □ Read more #nature #environment… Not-so-permafrost. □ Read more #greenland19. The Ice Age sur Twitter : "“Arctic permafrost and peatlands constitute frozen giants of the global carbon cycle. In the top few metres, the Arctic permafrost stores almost twice as much carbon as atmospheric CO2 and more than 200 times as much as atmosphe. 42,000-year-old foal entombed in Siberian permafrost still had blood in its veins Photo: Semyon Grigoriev #FossilFriday… WOW.... Look at these stunning frozen methane bubbles in Abraham Lake, #Canada captured yesterday morning 1st February... video.
Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven't Been This Hot in 115,000 Years. When the ice melts: the catastrophe of vanishing glaciers. The fall lasts long enough that I have time to watch the blue ice race upward, aeons of time compressed into glacial ice, flashing by in fractions of seconds.
I assume I’ve fallen far enough that I’ve pulled my climbing partner, Sean, into the crevasse with me. This is what it’s like to die in the mountains, a voice in my head tells me. Just as my mind completes that thought, the rope wrenches my climbing harness up. I bounce languidly up and down as the dynamic physics inherent in the rope play themselves out. Somehow Sean has checked my fall while still on the surface of the glacier. I brush the snow and chunks of ice from my hair, arms and chest and pull down the sleeves of my shirt.
I look down. “You get to look down one more time, then that’s it,” I tell myself out loud. Again, there’s only the black void yawning beneath me, swallowing everything, even sound. “Sean, are you OK?” “Yeah, I’m all right, but I’m right on the edge,” he calls back. Time passes. Greenhouse Gases Are Bubbling Up From Arctic Lakes That Were Recently Frozen. FROM BAD TO WORSE.
The bad news: Global warming is thawing Arctic permafrost. And that’s releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The really bad news: It’s happening faster than we previously thought. That’s the conclusion of a NASA-funded research project undertaken by researchers from the University of Alaska. They published their study in the journal Nature Communications on August 15. SLOW AND STEADY, ABRUPT AND AWFUL. Now that temperatures in the region are increasing, however, microbes in the newly thawed Arctic soil are breaking down these previously frozen organic bodies.
Researchers already knew about this process, which they call “slow thawing,” and have been factoring it into their climate models for some time now. SEEING IS BELIEVING. “Within decades you can get very deep thaw-holes, meters to tens of meters of vertical thaw,” first author Katey Walter Anthony said in a NASA news release. "This is a big deal," "In the permafrost world, this is a significant milestone in a disturbing trend—like carbon in the atmosphere reaching 400 parts per million.
Permafrost May Thaw Far Faster Than Expected and Accelerate Climate Change. Nikita Zimov was teaching students to do ecological fieldwork in northern Siberia when he stumbled on a disturbing clue that the frozen land might be thawing far faster than expected.
Zimov, like his father, Sergey Zimov, has spent years running a research station that tracks climate change in the rapidly warming Russian Far East. So when students probed the ground and took soil samples amid the mossy hummocks and larch forests near his home, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Nikita Zimov suspected something wasn't right. In April he sent a team of workers out with heavy drills to be sure. They bored into the soil a few feet down and found thick, slushy mud. Zimov said that was impossible. Except this year, it wasn't. New climate 'feedback loop' discovered in freshwater lakes. Image copyright Tanentzap.
"This is a big deal," "In the permafrost world, this is a significant milestone in a disturbing trend—like carbon in the atmosphere reaching 400 parts per million." #climatechange #ActOnClimate #science. Hunter Cutting sur Twitter : "Just when you think it can’t get any more surreal: NPR photo of 4 of the thousands and thousands of cooling tubes oil industry is burying in the Arctic to keep permafrost from melting so they can keep drilling. Melting Permafrost and the Housing Crisis in the Arctic. The Arctic’s carbon bomb might be even more potent than we thought. Far Northern Permafrost May Unleash Carbon Within Decades. A new study finds that the Arctic permafrost is the largest repository of mercury on Earth. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. And scientists now think there is around 15 million gallons frozen in permafrost soils. Why thawing permafrost matters #Arctic #climatechange #geomorphology…
Why thawing permafrost matters. In Bethel, Alaska, walls are splitting, houses are collapsing, and the main road looks like a kiddy rollercoaster.
In the coastal town of Kongiganak, sinking cemeteries prevent Alaskans from burying their dead in the ground. The village of Shishmaref, located on an island five miles from the western Alaska mainland, has eroded so much that it is contemplating total relocation. These communities are being plagued by permafrost that is thawing. Permafrost is ground that remains frozen for two or more consecutive years.
It is composed of rock, soil, sediments, and varying amounts of ice that bind the elements together. Found under a layer of soil, permafrost can be from three feet to 4,900 feet thick. Unfortunately, when permafrost warms and thaws, it releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Permafrost is already thawing in some places, and if the problem spreads, scientists worry it could initiate a runaway process of global warming. Arctic Is Experiencing a Warmer “New Normal,” NOAA Reports.
Recent observations of declining sea ice, persistent elevated temperatures, and other factors confirm that a new climate era endures in the Arctic, according to the just-released yearly, major assessment of the region by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“This year’s observations confirm that the Arctic shows no signs of returning to the reliably frozen state that it was in just a decade ago,” Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA’s Arctic Research Program, said yesterday as the agency unveiled its 2017 Arctic Report Card. “Arctic temperatures continue to increase at double the rate of global averages,” he told reporters at a news briefing yesterday at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in New Orleans, La. This video is circulating on Wechat & Weibo, melting permafrost, flowing like lava in #Tibet. New permafrost map shows areas in Alaska vulnerable to thaw-induced collapses - Alaska Dispatch News. Meanwhile, in Alaska. Russia: Pleistocene Park Born to Rewild to protect the steppe Regenerative Projects. When permafrost melts, what happens to all that stored carbon?
Thawing Arctic permafrost effects: Methane release, Siberian craters and anthrax. The Arctic permafrost is starting to thaw, releasing the ground from the frozen state it has been in for thousands of years.
At present, permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere covers an area spanning some 20 million square kilometres and is home to tens of millions of people. Regions covered include parts of the US, Canada and Russia. But what will happen when it defrosts? Max Holmes, the deputy director and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre, explains:
Permafrost - what is it? Businessinsider.com. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere NASA A key greenhouse gas responsible for warming the planet, carbon dioxide, isn't just hanging around in the air.
It's also locked up deep under the ground. In the soil, stocks of carbon have built up over thousands of years, and levels have been kept relatively stable by the slow activity of bacteria which use carbon for energy. Scientists have long speculated over whether global warming could be affecting this process. A new study by Yale University suggests that it is. Losses of soil carbon under global warming might equal U.S. emissions. (© stock.adobe.com) For decades scientists have speculated that rising global temperatures might alter the ability of soils to store carbon, potentially releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and triggering runaway climate change.
Yet thousands of studies worldwide have produced mixed signals on whether this storage capacity will actually decrease — or even increase — as the planet warms. Scientists have long feared this ‘feedback’ to the climate system. Now they say it’s happening. (iStock) At a time when a huge pulse of uncertainty has been injected into the global project to stop the planet’s warming, scientists have just raised the stakes even further.
In a massive new study published Wednesday in the influential journal Nature, no less than 50 authors from around the world document a so-called climate system “feedback” that, they say, could make global warming considerably worse over the coming decades. That feedback involves the planet’s soils, which are a massive repository of carbon due to the plants and roots that have grown and died in them, in many cases over vast time periods (plants pull in carbon from the air through photosynthesis and use it to fuel their growth). It has long been feared that as warming increases, the microorganisms living in these soils would respond by very naturally upping their rate of respiration, a process that in turn releases carbon dioxide or methane, leading greenhouse gases.