Methane From Alaskan Tundra Accelerating Climate Changes
The ‘ancient carbon’ of Alaska’s tundras is being released, starting a vicious warming cycle; “This is ancient carbon, thousands and millions of years old.” It’s being released “much earlier than we thought.”
Joe Romm, May 16, 2017 (ThinkProgress)
“The Alaskan tundra is warming so quickly it has become a net emitter of carbon dioxide ahead of schedule…Since CO2 is the primary heat-trapping greenhouse gas — and since the permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does today — this means a vicious cycle has begun that will speed up global warming…[This is the first substantial report that a major portion of the Arctic is a net source of heat-trapping emissions and] warns that our current climate models need to be updated…[For a very long time, the] permafrost, or tundra, has been a very large carbon freezer…But we’ve been leaving the freezer door wide open and are witnessing the permafrost being transformed from a long-term carbon locker to a short-term carbon un-locker…Melting permafrost can release not just CO2, but also methane, a much stronger heat-trapping gas…Russian scientists have recently discovered some 7,000 underground bubbles of permafrost-related methane in Siberia. Since methane traps heat 86 times more effectively than CO2 over a 20-year span, these findings suggest that the effect of the melting permafrost is even greater than first thought…” click here for more
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home