Melting Permafrost
A thawing permafrost layer from global heating can lead to severe impacts on people and the environment. As permafrost thaws, it turns into mud that cannot support the weight of the soil, vegetation, and could damanage infrastructure such as roads, buildings, and pipes.
Melting permafrost could also releases dangerous micro-organisms, carbon and methane carbon emissions that have been locked in the ice, causing rapid and unanticipated global heating.
Read a roundup of the headlines:
“Thawing permafrost — the long-frozen layer of soil that has underpinned the Arctic tundra and boreal forests of Alaska, Canada and Russia for millennia — is upending the lives of people such as Alexie. It’s also dramatically transforming the polar landscape, which is now peppered with massive sinkholes, newly formed or drained lakes, collapsing seashores and fire damage.
Overlooked and underestimated
It’s not just the 3.6 million people who live in polar regions who need to be worried about the thawing permafrost.
Everyone does – particularly the leaders and climate policymakers from nearly 200 countries now meeting in Egypt for COP 27, the annual UN climate summit.
The vast amount of carbon stored in the northernmost reaches of our planet is an overlooked and underestimated driver of climate crisis. The frozen ground holds an estimated 1,700 billion metric tons of carbon – roughly 51 times the amount of carbon the world released as fossil fuel emissions in 2019, according to NASA. It may already be emitting as much greenhouse gas as Japan.“
“Earth’s permafrost is thawing, and indigenous communities in the Arctic and scientists around the world say it’s high time this alarming loss of ground ice receives the global attention – and dedicated research – it deserves. As this phenomenon reshapes landscapes, displaces whole villages, and disrupts fragile animal habitats; it also threatens to release dangerous microorganisms and potential carbon emissions that have been locked in ice for thousands of years.”
United Nations, If you’re not thinking about the climate impacts of thawing permafrost, (here’s why) you should be
“In recent years, climate scientists have warned thawing permafrost in Siberia may be a “methane time bomb” detonating slowly. Now, a peer-reviewed study using satellite imagery and a review by an international organization are warning that warming temperatures in the far northern reaches of Russia are releasing massive measures of methane—a potent greenhouse gas with considerably more warming power than carbon dioxide.
“It’s not good news if it’s right,” Robert Max Holmes, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who was not involved in either report, tells Steve Mufson of the Washington Post. “Nobody wants to see more potentially nasty feedbacks and this is potentially one.”
Lead author Nikolaus Froitzheim, a geoscientist at the University of Bonn in Germany, is concerned about his study’s findings. Interpreting this data correctly “may make the difference between catastrophe and apocalypse” as the climate crisis worsens, he tells Tara Yarlagadda of Inverse.”
Smithsonian Magazine, Permafrost Thaw in Siberia Creates a Ticking ‘Methane Bomb’ of Greenhouse Gases, Scientists Warn
“Thawing permafrost releases greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and methane – to the atmosphere, as well as causing abrupt changes to the landscape.
However, research, published recently in Nature Climate Change, found the implications of waning permafrost could be much more widespread – with potential for the release of bacteria, unknown viruses, nuclear waste and radiation, and other chemicals of concern.
The paper describes how deep permafrost, at a depth of more than three metres, is one of the few environments on Earth that has not been exposed to modern antibiotics. More than 100 diverse microorganisms in Siberia’s deep permafrost have been found to be antibiotic resistant. As the permafrost thaws, there is potential for these bacteria to mix with meltwater and create new antibiotic-resistant strains.
Another risk concerns by-products of fossil fuels, which have been introduced into permafrost environments since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The Arctic also contains natural metal deposits, including arsenic, mercury and nickel, which have been mined for decades and have caused huge contamination from waste material across tens of millions of hectares.
Now-banned pollutants and chemicals, such as the insecticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, DDT, that were transported to the Arctic atmospherically and over time became trapped in permafrost, are at risk of re-permeating the atmosphere.
In addition, increased water flow means that pollutants can disperse widely, damaging animal and bird species as well as entering the human food chain.”
The European Space Agency, Permafrost thaw could release bacteria and viruses
More Reading
The Atlantic, Carbon isn't the most pressing problem in the permafrost
Hakai Magazine, The Toxic Threat in Thawing Permafrost