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hatrack

(59,436 posts)
Fri Apr 19, 2013, 08:14 AM Apr 2013

Potsdam Institute - Permafrost Zones Lose Capacity To Store Carbon Under Nearly All Temp. Outcomes

Several research studies have shown that thawing permafrost accelerates organic decomposition and leads to carbon release into the atmosphere. But the thawing of permafrost also has another effect – increased vegetation growth due to warming leads to increased carbon input into the soil. Until recently, this vegetation feedback had not been considered by researchers in their models.

Now a team in Germany has, for the first time, investigated the robustness of permafrost carbon dynamics against climate change, taking into account changes in vegetation distribution. They found that, while in the short term vegetation will store carbon, in the long term the thawing permafrost is bad news for carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

"In our simulations, the permafrost zone loses its capacity to sequester carbon under almost all considered levels of global warming," said Sibyll Schaphoff from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany. "The current sink will be amplified until 2050 but already around 2080 it will diminish or even turn into a source in 2100. Only for the 3.0 K global-mean-temperature-increase scenario does the permafrost zone still constitute a small sink."

Schaphoff and her colleagues used the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model LPJmL that simulates plant physiological and ecological processes and includes a newly developed discrete-layer energy-balance permafrost module and a vertical carbon distribution within the soil layer. The model is able to reproduce the interactions between vegetation and soil-carbon dynamics as well as to simulate dynamic permafrost changes resulting from changes in the climate.

EDIT

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/53024

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