When snow blankets the countryside it covers everything over, and seems to make the world new again. However, it’s a different story on the slopes of Mount Everest where melting ice is giving up bodies of climbers frozen in time. Observers are wondering what else permafrost could release, now it is beginning to retreat from the great warming that has begun.
What Permafrost Could Release if Warming Continues
The Arctic landscape was once a green and fertile place where animals roamed among tall trees. Their remains are still hidden under the permafrost but this is melting. Already one can see logs appearing, except they are bones of mammoths and other animals from the Pleistocene Era.
Associate scientist Sue Natali from The Woods Hole Research Centre, Massachusetts told reporter Tim Smedley what else is down there. The organic-rich permafrost apparently holds an estimated 1,500 billion tons of carbon. “That’s about twice as much carbon as in the atmosphere,” she explained. “And three times more carbon than is stored in all the world’s forests.”
How the Permafrost Might Release This Carbon
If global warming continues, the permafrost could release this organic matter to the air as it melts. Microbial organisms will feast upon it. They will beak the matter down as food, and excrete the remains as CO2 or methane.
One-tenth of that organic reserve will release 130-150 billion tons of greenhouse gas that way. To put the number in perspective, this equals the current rate of total US emissions, every year until 2100 cumulatively.
The Paris Accord did not account for this carbon ‘time bomb’ when it set targets to prevent warming rising more than 2 degrees C. However, Sue Natali is still positive. “The actions by the international community will have a substantial impact on how much carbon will release,” she says.
Those Decisions Will Have a Substantial Impact
Those decisions will have a major influence on how much of the permafrost will actually thaw. And just how much carbon the melt could release. And we do have some control over that,” she says. At least for now, we feel constrained to add.
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Preview Image: Recently Thawed Arctic Permafrost and Coastal Erosion
