2 New Studies; Areas Of Siberian Permafrost No Longer Freezing; Below-Ground Temps Up 10F In 5 Yrs

[hatrack]

EDIT

Permafrost temperatures across the Arctic have been rising since at least the 1970s—so much that small-scale localized thawing is already underway in many places. But the vast majority of this frozen land is still insulated by an active layer of freezing and thawing ground above it. Now signs are emerging that the annual freeze-up can quickly change.

Eleven miles downriver from where the Zimovs’ started their drilling, Mathias Goeckede with Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry spends weeks each summer traversing crumbling boardwalks over spongy Siberian ground. He tracks carbon exchange between the earth and the atmosphere.

Measurements at his site show that snow depth there has roughly doubled in five years. When excessive snow smothers the ground, warmth below the surface may not dissipate during winter. Data from a drill hole on Goeckede's site appears to capture that phenomenon: In April, temperatures 13 inches below ground there increased roughly 10 degrees Fahrenheit in that same five-year period. "This is just one site, and it's just five years, so this really should be considered just a case-study," Goeckede says. "But if you assume it's a trend or that it might continue like this, then it's alarming."

Thousands of miles away, Vladimir Romanovsky saw something similar. Romanovsky, a permafrost expert at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, runs some of the most extensive permafrost monitoring sites in North America, with detailed records going back 25 years, and in some cases longer. "For all years before 2014, the complete freeze-up of the active layer would happen in mid-January," he says. "Since 2014, the freeze-up date has shifted to late February and even March." But this winter, Fairbanks, too, saw extremely heavy snow. And for the first time on record, the active layer at two of Romanovsky's sites didn't freeze at all.

EDIT

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/08/news-arctic-permafrost-may-thaw-faster-than-expected/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=social::src=twitter::cmp=editorial::add=tw20190116env-arcticgroundupdate::rid=&sf206053901=1

[anarch]

1. welp...

and I gotta wonder what this situation is doing to the levels of methane in our atmosphere, which I'm not sure anyone is even looking at as a major contributor to "greenhouse gas" effects.

Sometime in the not too distant future, we'll have a summer with no arctic ice...I think we have already gone past the point of no return with respect to a lot of climate change factors that will be felt in an unstoppable chain reaction over the next century; I sometimes wonder if that situation hasn't informed a lot of the seemingly callous decisions that capitalists have made with respect to potential mitigation steps--they may have done the math and come to the conclusion that nothing we could possibly do at this point would really make all that much difference, and certainly won't save us, so fuck it, why not just continue raping the land and profiting as much as possible while we still have the capability? We're all dead already anyway, so screw the future...that's horrible and species-suicidal, but there's a certain cold logic to it.

[democratisphere]

2. Yeah. Human Greed.