This bit of information really made me perk up my ears about where we are in the climate change process. Here’s what I’m talking about:
WASHINGTON: Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely seep into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming, scientists warn.
What the scientists are saying is that the heat-trapping gases under the frozen Arctic ground may be an even bigger factor in our climate change problem than cutting down forests. This is a scenario the scientists hadn’t been including in a lot of their forecasts. The release of these gases won’t be as polluting as the crap coming out of the power plants, cars, trucks and planes – but still polluting!
Melting Permafrost
I first heard about this in a little play about climate change that some friends of mine at the church I attend did this year. (We did a video of it – It was called, “Mother Earth vs. World’s People” – you can see it here: Mother Earth vs. World’s People ) One of the characters represented this melting of the permafrost.
What this all means is that over the next two or three decades a total of about 45 billion metric tons of carbon from methane and carbon dioxide will seep into the atmosphere when permafrost thaws during summers. That is about the same amount of global warming gas we spew out every five years by burning coal, gas and other fossil fuels.
This all comes down to the fact we will speed up the warming process by 20 to 30 percent than we would from fossil fuel emissions alone.
It’s not unusual for the first few inches of permafrost to thaw every summer. What’s different now is it’s a heck of a lot warmer so the scientists are now thinking it will be more like 10 feet of thawing permafrost. The gases come from all the decaying plants which have been frozen below ground for millennia. One of these leaking gases is methane which is 25 times stronger than carbon dioxide in trapping heat. There was a professor at the University of Fairbanks Alaska, Katey Walter Anthony, who set leaking methane gas on fire and had flames shooting far above her head. She said, “Places like this are all around. We’re tapping into old carbon that has been locked up in the ground for 30,000 or 40,000 years.” This triggers what Anthony and other scientists call a feedback cycle. The world warms, mostly because of human-made greenhouse gases. That thaws permafrost, releasing more natural greenhouse has, augmenting the warming problem. The scientist s do all agree there is some guesswork here because of the limited data from this relatively new issue.
The World Meteorological Organization this week said the worst of the warming in 2011 was in the northern areas – where there is permafrost – and especially Russia. Since 1970, the Arctic has warmed at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
The thawing permafrost also causes trees to lean – scientists call them “drunken trees” – and roads to buckle. Scientist, F. Stuart Chapin III said when he first moved to Fairbanks the road from his house to the University of Alaska had to be resurfaced once a decade.
“Now it gets resurfaced every year due to thawing permafrost,” Chapin said.
Peace,
Ron Rink