No more than a few degrees of warming, only a few, can trigger abrupt thaws of vast frozen land thereby releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases as a product of collapsing landscapes, and it feeds upon itself.
Photograph Source: Dave Fox – CC BY-SA 4.0
Twenty-five percent (25%) of the Northern Hemisphere is permafrost. By all
appearances, it is melting well beyond natural background rates, in fact,
substantially!
Making matters much, much worse, new research has identified past warming
events of large-scale permafrost thaw in the Arctic that may be analogous to
today, thus spotting a parallel problem of large-scale thawing accompanied
by massively excessive carbon emissions spewing into the atmosphere, like
there’s no tomorrow. (Source: Jannik Martens, Remobilization of Dormant
Carbon From Siberian-Arctic Permafrost During Three Past Warming Events,
Science Advances, vol. 6, no. 42, October 16, 2020)
Permafrost thawing is not, at all times, simply “thawing.” Of course, as a
standalone, the word “thawing” implies a rather evenly keeled methodical
process without any specific definition of scale. But, there’s thawing, and
then, there’s “large-scale thawing,” which is kinda like turning loose a
behemoth. The results are never pretty.
As global warming powers up, like its doing now, it has a penchant for
finding enormous spans of frozen mud and silt filled with iced-species in
quasi-permanent frozen states known as permafrost. As it melts, it’s full of
surprises, some interesting, as well as some that are horribly dangerous,
for example, emitting huge quantities of carbon, thus kicking into high gear
some level of runaway global warming that threatens to wipe out agriculture.
As a matter of fact, according to the research, no more than a few degrees
of warming, only a few, can trigger abrupt thaws of vast frozen land thereby
releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases as a product of collapsing
landscapes, and it feeds upon itself. Indeed, the research effort identified
“surges in greenhouse gas emissions… on a massive scale,” Ibid.
The study suggests that massive permafrost ecosystem thawing is subject to
indeterminate timing sequences, but it’s armed with a “sensitive trigger”
abruptly altering the landscape in massive fashion. In short, an event could
arise out of the blue. It’s well known that Arctic permafrost holds
considerably more carbon captured in a frozen state than has already been
emitted into the atmosphere.
Already, over just the past two years, other field studies have shown
instances where thawing permafrost is 70 years ahead of scientists’ models,
prompting the thought that thawing may be cranking up even as the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fails to anticipate it.
After all, permafrost is not included in the IPCC’s carbon budget, meaning
signatories to the Paris accord of 2015 will need to recalculate their quest
to save the world from too much carbon emitting too fast for any kind of
smooth functionality of the planet’s climate system. In turn, it undoubtedly
negatively impacts the support, or lack thereof, for food-growing regions,
which could actually collapse, similar to cascading dominos. Poof!
In the Canadian High Arctic: “Observed maximum thaw depths at our sites are
already exceeding those projected to occur by 2090.” (Source: Louise M.
Farquharson et al, Climate Change Drives Widespread and Rapid Thermokarst
Development in Very Cold Permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic, Geophysical
Research Letters, June 10, 2019)
According to Susan Natali of Woods Hole Research Center (Massachusetts) the
Arctic has already transformed from a carbon sink to a carbon emitter:
“Given that the Arctic has been taking up carbon for tens of thousands of
years, this shift to a carbon source is important because it highlights a
new dynamic in the functioning of the Earth System.” (Source: Thawing
Permafrost Has Turned the Arctic Into a Carbon Emitter, NewScientist, Oct.
21, 2019)
A 14-year study referenced by Dr. Natali shows annualized 1.66 gigatonnes
CO2 emitted from the Arctic versus 1.03 gigatonnes absorbed, a major turning
point in paleoclimate history, a chilling turn for the worse that threatens
10,000 years of our wonderful Holocene era “not too hot, not too cold.”
Alas, that spectacular Goldilocks life of perfection is rapidly becoming a
remembrance of the past.
Additionally, according to Vladimir Romanovsky – Permafrost Laboratory,
Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) there are
definitive geophysical signs of permafrost that survived thousands of years
now starting to thaw. (Source: New Climate Warnings in Old Permafrost: ‘It’s
a Little Scary Because it’s Happening Under Our Feet,’ Bob Berwyn, Inside
Climate News, October 16, 2020)
As stated by Romanovsky: “The new (Jannik Martens, Remobilization) research
is yet more evidence that the amplified warming in the Arctic can release
carbon at a massive scale.”
Nobody knows how soon such an event will break loose in earnest, but global
warming has already penetrated the upper permafrost layers, as cliffs of
coastal permafrost are collapsing at an accelerating rate. In short, the
current news about thawing/collapsing permafrost is decidedly negative and a
threat to life, as we know it.
The Martens’ study conclusively states:
“The results from this study on large-scale OC remobilization from permafrost are consistent with a growing set of observational records from the Arctic Ocean and provide support for modeling studies that simulated large injections of CO2 into the atmosphere during deglaciation (14–16). This demonstrates that Arctic warming by only a few degrees may suffice to abruptly activate large-scale permafrost thawing, indicating a sensitive trigger for a threshold-like permafrost climate change feedback.” (Jannik Martens, Remobilization)
Thus, as the Holocene era wanes right before humanity’s eyes, the
Anthropocene, the age of humans, stands on the world stage all alone with
its own shadow and with ever fewer, and fewer, and fewer vertebrates roaming
amongst fields of scorched, blackened plant life. What, or who, will it eat?
According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and world-renowned biologist
E.O. Wilson:
If we choose the path of destruction, the planet will continue to descend irreversibly into the Anthropocene Epoch, the biologically final age in which the planet exists almost exclusively by, for, and of ourselves.
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