Look at all the thermokarst
Turns out permafrost isn’t perma.
Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.
A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.
They flew an old prop plane to extremely remote areas up there.
Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognisable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.
The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.
People in the Trump administration are no doubt composing a press release saying hooray more land for farming plus shipping in the Arctic at last hooray hooray.
Scientists are concerned about the stability of permafrost because of the risk that rapid thawing could release vast quantities of heat-trapping gases, unleashing a feedback loop that would in turn fuel even faster temperature rises.
It’s already going much faster than predicted.
Even if current commitments to cut emissions under the 2015 Paris agreement are implemented, the world is still far from averting the risk that these kinds of feedback loops will trigger runaway warming, according to models used by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
With scientists warning that sharply higher temperatures would devastate the global south and threaten the viability of industrial civilisation in the northern hemisphere, campaigners said the new paper reinforced the imperative to cut emissions.
“Thawing permafrost is one of the tipping points for climate breakdown and it’s happening before our very eyes,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International. “This premature thawing is another clear signal that we must decarbonise our economies, and immediately.”
And we’re not going to.
Having been up there in warm weather, and been close to digging, we should be crossing over into terrified now. You can smell the fugitive methane from the ground from a hole of 50 square centimeters. Imagine the magnitude of fugitive methane from the whole North.
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a fart.
(sorry)
There’s no good way to predict these things because the positive feedback results in a highly unstable, nonlinear system. So they linearize their models as best they can, and hope that the results are close. Clearly, they weren’t in this case.
I’m not a climatologist, but I have expertise in nonlinear dynamics. These systems exhibit the same general characteristics, and my experience and instinct tells me that it’s far too late to do anything to reverse this trend. Even if we achieve zero carbon emissions tomorrow, it would be too late–and Trump is busy trying to ramp the emissions UP.
I have no such experience, but the endless reports rolling in that pretty much all say “much faster than expected” tell me the same thing.
Mass migrations, famines, wars, epidemics, governments bankrupted…bad moon rising.
I am not sad to be old. I could well be dead before it will kill me.
James, I agree. Once upon a time I was a chemist (the research kind). Our atmosphere, indeed biosphere, is ultimately a massive chemical reaction (yes I know there is physics and biology involved, but chemistry is applied physics and biology is applied chemistry, so we’ll centre the chemistry). People tend to focus on the ‘short’ term. What is going to happen in the next 50 to 100 years (we think). I look at data suggesting more rapid and larger impacts and I start to think about meta-stable states. Can we tip from one meta-stable state to another? I suspect we can. It’s happened before in earth’s past and there is no reason to suppose that it can’t happen now. The only question is how much of a nudge is required, the lag time and whether it is even possible to stop the tip if we recognise it is happening. Worse, once a transition is underway, we really have little idea of where it would come to rest and whether the new state would be survivable for us (it will be survivable for something, probably). Like chigau, I suspect I’ll see my lie out in relative comfort and security. My friends children, I’m not so sure. There children? Probably not unless WE do something about it.
I wish I could disagree, but as an environmental scientist, I am afraid you’re probably right. And most of the things I read that are written for popular consumption hesitate to say that. They worry if we tell people how bad it is, they will just shut down and do nothing.
Most people are doing nothing now. I’m not sure it could get worse.
[…] oh. Again. It was the Canadian Arctic, it was the Himalayas, now it’s the Antarctic. All the ice that we thought was so locked up […]