permafrost

belated, start to disambig

promote 2nd on seed vault

see also carbon bomb, arctic forest fire, methane?

yikes pandemic

https://www.alternet.org/zombie-virus/

AMPLIFY FDBK DOOM SPIRAL

https://www.alternet.org/inferno-climate-change-fiery-apocalypse/

Jane Braxton Little: A Global Four-Alarm Blaze

Just over a year ago, my old friend Jane Braxton Little experienced climate change up close and personal. Greenville, California, the Gold Rush-era town she’d lived in since the 1970s (when I used to visit her there) was burned down in the raging Dixie Fire. She wrote about it vividly at TomDispatch. For a time, she became, as she put it, a “climate refugee,” just as so many of the survivors of Hurricane Ian did in Florida this fall.

Honestly, it isn’t really up for debate anymore (unless you’re in the Trumpublican Party), is it? This overheating planet of ours is growing ever more perilous right before our eyes, whether you’re talking about increasingly severe megadroughts, floods, fires, storms, or melting glaciers and ice sheets. And it’s only going to get worse as, despite everything we now know, humanity continues to put record amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. As it happens, the latest war on this planet, the still expanding one in Ukraine, is only making matters worse, while pouring record profits into the coffers of the giant fossil-fuel companies whose CEOs are living as if there were no tomorrow.

Of course, there will indeed be a tomorrow and another after that, even if they prove ever more perilous. When it comes to fire, as Little explains today, in its own fashion, this planet is already ablaze. As a United Nations report put it, we’re experiencing “a global wildfire crisis… turning landscapes into tinderboxes.” Already reporting on climate change when the Dixie Fire hit her community, Little saw all this in a horrifying way. Now, take a step back with her and she’ll fill you in on the inferno this planet threatens to become. Tom

Inferno:Climate Disaster Is Turning the Planet into a Tinderbox

Mike Savala’s boots scuffed the edge of a singed patch of forest littered with skinny fingers of burnt ponderosa pine needles. Nearby, an oak seedling sizzled as a yellow-shirted firefighter hit it with a stream of water. Spurts of smoke rose from blackened ground the size of a hockey rink. A 100-foot Ponderosa pine towered overhead.

“Third response today,” said Savala, shaking his head.

This hillside in my own backyard in California’s northern Sierra Nevada mountains hadn’t seen lightning for months and yet it had still burst into flames. All summer long, it had baked in heat that extended into an unseasonably hot autumn. Now, in late October, it was charred by a fire of mysterious origin. A spark from a wandering hiker? An errant ember from a burn pile? Spontaneous combustion?

Savala, a fire-crew boss for the Greenville Rancheria of Maidu Indians, scanned the sky. Cloudless. There had only been three inches of precipitation since July 1st — 15% of normal. And no wonder, since California is in the throes of its fourth dry year. More than 95% of the state is now classified as under severe or extreme drought.

Although small and easily contained, this tiny fire in rural northeastern California was another wake-up call, up close and personal, about an ominous trend. A warming planet and changing land use are fueling a dramatic surge in forest fires worldwide. Terrifying projections forecast a 57% increase in extreme fires globally by century’s end. The indisputable cause: climate change.

“The heating of the planet is turning landscapes into tinderboxes,” a team of 50 researchers from six continents reported in “Spreading Like Wildfire: The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires,” published this year by the United Nations Environment Program. That document describes what can only be viewed as a future flaming version of planetary collapse that could push humanity perilously close to a precipice of no return.

Like dozens of previous reports from the U.N. and other international organizations, it describes a situation that, while dire, isn’t yet hopeless. Despite those ever stronger, hotter, drier winds that will fan the flames, governments could slow climate change by improving their forest management techniques, planning and preparing far better, and communicating more effectively. To reduce the likelihood of future mega-fires means working with forests where fire is an element as essential to ecosystems as sunshine or rain. It also means working with forest communities, where local knowledge accumulated over generations is too often shunned. And of course, it means honestly confronting our reluctance to ween ourselves from the fossil fuels that power our factories, cars, and those absurdly unnecessary leaf blowers that are backing us toward the cliff.

A Fiery Feedback Loop

If my small backyard fire was a personal wake-up call, the 2021 Dixie fire was a four-alarm blaze. On its rampage from the Feather River Canyon through Lassen Volcanic National Park and beyond, it destroyed my adopted town of Greenville, 160 miles northeast of San Francisco. In fact, it torched close to a million acres. Nearly half of them burned so intensely that the once-majestic, now blackened pine and fir forests there may never again support the biologically diverse ecosystems that drew me here so long ago.

The single-largest fire in California’s history, Dixie was part of a record-breaking fire year globally. Around the world, fires burned nearly 23 million acres, an area almost the size of Portugal. Dixie contributed to the worldwide loss to fire of more than a third of the tree cover that disappeared in those 12 months, according to a report from the World Resources Institute. And this is only a preview of what’s to come. Scientists believe that there may be a 30% increase in extreme fires globally by 2050.

Such an acceleration of forest fires will, it seems, spare few parts of the world. Fires, burning longer and hotter, are already flaring in unexpected places, shattering assumptions about what’s safe, let alone normal. Even the Arctic, that remote expanse of sea ice, treeless permafrost, and minus 40-degree Celsius temperatures, home to polar bears, lemmings, and snowy owls, is now beginning to burn. After July 2019, the hottest month on record so far, fires erupted across the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia. As temperatures soared to as much as six degrees Celsius above normal, flames spurted across an expanse of tundra larger than England.

Arctic fires are particularly worrisome because of the vast amounts of carbon locked beneath that frozen soil. Much of it, after all, is peatlands, largely formed at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. Although it covers just 3% of the Earth’s surface, peat sequesters 42% of the carbon stored in all other types of vegetation, including the world’s forests. Global warming is now drying out that peat, making it ever more susceptible to fire. As it burns, of course, it releases that carbon.

Nor is such a bio-feedback loop limited to the Arctic. As the world becomes hotter and drier, the carbon we emit from our reliance on fossil fuels is drying out forests everywhere, making them ever more prone to burn, while extending burning seasons globally. Firefighters in California used to don fire-resistant Nomex shirts in May or June, knowing they could shed them by mid-October. Now, there’s barely a pause before things heat up again and those shirts go right back on.

As wildfires are transformed into year-round challenges, the carbon they release only further contributes to emissions from other sources, making it that much more difficult to halt rising temperatures. Think of it as a mutually exacerbating feedback loop: wildfires are worsened by climate change, which, in turn, is intensified by the ever-fiercer wildfires.

Management for Better — or Worse...

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-study-greenhouse-gas-emissions-2648886531.htm

1120

A controversial new climate study has found that, even if greenhouse gas emissions were halted tomorrow, it might not be enough to stop temperatures from continuing to rise.

The study, published in Scientific Reports Thursday, was conducted by two researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School. They used the ESCIMO climate model to determine that, even if emissions ceased tomorrow, the permafrost would continue to thaw for hundreds of years.

"According to our models, humanity is beyond the point-of-no-return when it comes to halting the melting of permafrost using greenhouse gas cuts as the single tool," lead author and professor emeritus of climate strategy Jorgen Randers told AFP. "If we want to stop this melting process we must do something in addition – for example, suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it underground, and make Earth's surface brighter."

However, other scientists have pointed to the simplicity of the model Randers and his colleague Ulrich Goluke used and cautioned against misinterpreting their findings as a reason to give up on climate action.

"This paper clearly may be cited in support of a misleading message that it is now 'too late' to avoid catastrophic climate change, which would have the potential to cause unnecessary despair," University of Exeter climate scientist professor Richard Betts said in response. "However, the study is nowhere near strong enough to make such a frightening message credible."

So what exactly does the study say? The researchers used their model to see what would happen by 2500 if emissions stopped today and if they slowly declined to zero by 2100, as AFP explained. In the first scenario, temperatures would still rise to around 2.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within the next 50 years, taper off, then rise again starting in 2150. By 2500, the world would be around three degrees Celsius warmer and sea levels would rise by around three meters (approximately 9.8 feet). In the second, temperature and sea level rise would end up in the same place, but the temperature increase would be much faster.

The reason for the persistent increase comes from three feedback loops, the model found.

1. The melting of sea ice, which means that the sun's heat is absorbed into the darker ocean instead of reflected back by the bright ice.
2. The thawing of permafrost, which releases more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
3. Increased moisture in the atmosphere, which in turn raises temperatures.

The only way to have prevented runaway climate change would have been to have stopped burning fossil fuels between 1960 and 1970, the model found, as USA TODAY reported. In order to stop temperatures and sea levels from rising now, we would have to remove at least 33 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year starting this one.

The study authors were the first to admit their findings were limited to one model.

"We encourage other model builders to explore our discovery in their (bigger) models, and report on their findings," they wrote.

However, Betts noted that their model was not the model used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and did not realistically simulate how the climate works.

Penn State University meteorologist Michael Mann agreed. He told USA TODAY that it was not very complex and did not accurately reproduce atmospheric and ocean circulation systems.

"While such models can be useful for conceptual inferences, their predictions have to be taken with great skepticism. Far more realistic climate models that do resolve the large-scale dynamics of the ocean, atmosphere and carbon cycle, do NOT produce the dramatic changes these authors argue for based on their very simplified model," he said. "It must be taken not just with a grain of salt, but a whole salt-shaker worth of salt."

That said, even the models used by the IPCC show that we will need to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reach the Paris agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, even if we achieve zero emissions by 2050.

"What the study does draw attention to is that reducing global carbon emissions to zero by 2050 is just the start of our actions to deal with climate change," University College London climate professor Mark Maslin said in response.

omfg carbon AND methane bomb?!

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/understanding-the-norths-climate-change-trifecta/

Arctic Circle became unbelievably hot on June 20. In the Russian community of Verkhoyansk, temperatures topped 38C, marking what may be the highest air temperature ever recorded within the Arctic.

The temperatures at Verkhoyansk are part of a larger trend across western Russia this summer, with small communities throughout the region reporting temperatures that are smashing local records that have stood for decades. During the latter half of June, surface temperatures throughout western Siberia were as much as 10C above historical norms, marking one of the hottest Junes on record despite relatively cool temperatures at the start of the month.

For scientists the world-over these record-breaking temperatures are alarm bells, demonstrating the kind of extreme weather events we can expect to see more often if climate change continues unchecked. However, it is the long-term fallout from modern heat waves that has many northern scientists deeply concerned, as they will affect our planet for decades to come.

The fires that follow

During heat waves surface temperatures soar, often triggering a chain of fire-promoting weather conditions including extreme thunderstorms. These thunderstorms have hundreds of lightning strikes that can ignite the dry soils and vegetation that serve as fuel for fire.

In northern regions like the boreal biome, these fire-promoting conditions can cause large-scale wildfires that burn millions of hectares of forest in a single summer.

Historically, humanity has considered wildfire a true disaster and spent considerable resources to suppress them. We now understand that despite the initial loss of established trees and soils, wildfires are a natural and integral part of the boreal biome.

Modern wildfires, however, are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity, covering a larger area due weather events like severe heat waves. In extreme fire years, these modern wildfires can burn deep into the organic soils that characterize boreal forests. These carbon-rich soils have been built up over thousands of years and hold approximately 30 per cent of the world's terrestrial carbon stocks.

When fires burn deep into soils or return too quickly to a forest, they lose their “ancient carbon" stocks. Instead of being held in the ground these ancient carbon reserves are combusted and released back into the atmosphere, increasing the carbon levels. The higher carbon dioxide levels generated by wildfires intensify climate change impacts like heat waves, which can lead to further wildfires, forming a powerful “positive feedback" loop with climate change.

While these trends alone are alarming, northern researchers warn that the fallout from heat waves won't stop when the fires burn out. In northern regions where the soils historically stay frozen year-round, a whole new set of changes are beginning to take form.

When permafrost perishes

Permafrost forms on the landscape when soil materials remain below freezing for two or more consecutive years. In some areas permafrost forms in direct response to a cold climate.

As one moves further south, however, permafrost becomes increasingly dependent on the presence of thick organic soils, surface vegetation and a shady overstorey to survive the warm summer months. In those cases, the ecosystem acts like a giant protective blanket, limiting the sun's heat that is able to reach the frozen permafrost materials below.

Carbon-rich peat burns readily, making it good fuel for lightning-caused fires.

(U.S. National Parks Service, Western Arctic National Parklands)]

When permafrost ecosystems burn, the wildfire consumes these protective layers, often triggering permafrost thaw. This can occur gradually, with the thawed layer expanding slowly over decades, or abruptly, with the thawed layer expanding dramatically over years. The land may cave in or sink, plant communities may change completely and local water flows may be rerouted.

In both cases, the loss of permafrost makes the massive Arctic carbon reserves more vulnerable to loss. With gradual thaw microbes are able to break down and release the previously frozen carbon back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In contrast, abrupt thaw commonly occurs in ice-rich permafrost resulting in warmer but also wetter soils. Under these conditions decomposition still occurs but carbon is commonly returned to the atmosphere as methane, a greenhouse gas approximately 30 times more powerful at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

All this lost carbon may make the positive feedback with climate change even stronger. While scientists are working to understand if the vegetation that grows after permafrost thaw is able to offset all the carbon released during decomposition, most current models indicate that permafrost thaw will ultimately be a source of atmospheric carbon.

Read more: More frequent fires could dramatically alter boreal forests and emit more carbon]

Researchers are coming to understand just how tightly linked these disturbances caused by climate change really are. What appears as an individual event — heat wave, forest fire or permafrost thaw — has cascading ramifications through time and space in the Arctic, potentially serving as the seed crystal for the next disturbance in the coming months, years or even decades that follow.

Heat waves, wildfires and permafrost thaw represent an environmental trifecta that are inherently linked and drive change in the occurrence and intensity of one another.

Catherine Dieleman, Research associate, Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph

This article is republished from The Conversation

https://www.ecowatch.com/heatwave-doomsday-vault-2646863764.html

Johnny Wood

What better place to build a Doomsday Vault than the remote, snow-covered islands of Norway's Arctic Svalbard? Sitting around 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, the facility is buried in permafrost to protect the precious seed samples housed there. But a freak heatwave is causing the region's ice to melt.

Following several days of near record-breaking hot weather in July, Svalbard temperatures topped out at 21.7℃, the country's meteorological institute reported. This is the hottest ever recorded here, exceeding the previous record of 21.3℃ setover 40 years earlier and a stark contrast to the region's average of between 5-7℃ for this time of year.

Deep Trouble?

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault – also known as the Doomsday Vault – is a gigantic bunker, sitting deep inside a mountain surrounded by snowy wastelands. The facility stores close to 900,000 seed samples from around the world and acts as a sort of back-up plan for agriculture, should disaster render parts of the planet unlivable or the world suffer a catastrophe, such as nuclear war or extreme climate change.

It's been described as an "insurance policy for food security."

Inside the vault, temperatures are kept below minus 18℃, cold enough to keep the seed samples safe for at least 200 years, even without backup power. But climate change is causing problems for the vault.

In 2016, which was the warmest year on record according to NASA, soaring temperatures caused meltwater to breach the vault's entrance tunnel. While no seeds were damaged, the floodwater left an expensive repair bill and tarnished the vault's reputation as impregnable to natural or manmade disasters.

The Heat Is On

Warming in the islands has been underway for some time. Figures for 2017 show average temperatures are between 3-5℃ hotter than in 1971, according to the Climate in Svalbard 2100 report, with the largest increases affecting the inner fjords.

Between 2071 and 2100, average temperatures throughout the archipelago will increase by between 7-10℃, the report predicts, shortening the snow season and causing loss of near-surface permafrost.

What's happening in Svalbard is symptomatic of wider changes impacting the Arctic expanse, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Parts of the Canadian Arctic are**thawing 70 years earlier than predicted**, scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks found, a sign that climate change could be happening faster than first thought.

As warmer-than-average summers destabilize permafrost, much of which has lain frozen for millennia, methane and other gases trapped in the ice could be released at scale,accelerating climate change. In turn, warmer temperatures would lead to further permafrost loss.

Melting ice, on land and at sea, destroys animal habitats for species like polar bears and Arctic foxes, which use their snowy white coats as camouflage either to hunt for food or avoid predators.

Climate scientist Dr Boris K Biskaborn of the Alfred Wegener Institute polar and marine research centre found Arctic continuous permafrost ground temperatures increased by 0.39℃ between 2008 and 2016. A similar trend was found in Antarctica, with increases of 0.29℃ over the same period.

Warming ground temperatures are an indication of the extent of climate change. Biskaborn predicts melting permafrost could lead to increased Arctic air temperatures of up to 0.27℃ by 2100.

Svalbard's seed bank exists to protect the world's most valuable natural resources from catastrophe. If we want to avoid making multiple withdrawals, tackling the underlying causes of climate change is a priority.WEF

==

Current estimates of carbon emissions from melting Arctic permafrost rely on a model of a gradual melt. New research has found abrupt thawing of permafrost which means carbon emissions estimates should be doubled. The rate at which permafrost is thawing in the Arctic is gouging holes in the landscape, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has not considered the phenomenon of thermokarst — the degraded land ravaged by an abrupt thaw. When the permafrost that supports the soil disappears, then hillsides collapse and enormous sinkholes suddenly appear, as Wired reported. The effect runs through meters of permafrost and takes a matter of months or a few years. That upends the traditional models of permafrost thawing, which look at a few centimeters of permafrost melt over several decades. The rapid change to the permafrost shocks the landscape, causing an enormous release of carbon.

"The amount of carbon coming off that very narrow amount of abrupt thaw in the landscape, that small area, is still large enough to double the climate consequences and the permafrost carbon feedback," said study lead author Merritt Turetsky, of the University of Guelph and University of Colorado Boulder, as Wired reported.

The researchers found that abrupt thawing will happen in less than 20 percent of the permafrost zone, "but could affect half of permafrost carbon through collapsing ground, rapid erosion and landslides," the authors wrote in the study.

Not only does an abrupt thaw release carbon, but it also releases a tremendous amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. So, while only 5 percent of the permafrost may experience abrupt thaw at one time, the emissions will be equal to a much larger area going through a gradual thaw. This can rapidly change the landscape drastically.

"Forests can become lakes in the course of a month, landslides occur with no warning, and invisible methane seep holes can swallow snowmobiles whole," Turetsky said in a statement from the University of Colorado Boulder. "Systems that you could walk on with regular hiking boots and that were dry enough to support tree growth when frozen can thaw, and now all of a sudden these ecosystems turn into a soupy mess," Turetsky added.

The most worrisome permafrost is the type that holds a lot of water because frozen water takes up more space than water. When it thaws it loses a lot of volume. "Where permafrost tends to be lake sediment or organic soils, the type of earth material that can hold a lot of water, these are like sponges on the landscape," Turetsky said, as Wired reported. "When you have thaw, we see really dynamic and rapid changes."

Turetsky has witnessed the rapid change in the course of the study. She has seen the melting submerge equipment she has placed to check temperature and methane.

"When you come back in, it's a lake and there's three meters of water at the surface. You have to probably say goodbye to your equipment," she told Wired. "Essentially, we're taking terra firma and making it terra soupy."

The researchers realized that the thermokarst they observed was absent in climate emissions models and tried to account for its output.

"The impacts from abrupt thaw are not represented in any existing global model and our findings indicate that this could amplify the permafrost climate-carbon feedback by up to a factor of two, thereby exacerbating the problem of permissible emissions to stay below specific climate change targets," said David Lawrence, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a coauthor of the study in a press release.

The paper shows the sudden need to include permafrost thaw in all climate models.

"We can definitely stave off the worst consequences of climate change if we act in the next decade," Turetsky said in a press release. "We have clear evidence that policy is going to help the north and thus it's going to help dictate our future climate."

• 'Doomsday' Seed Vault Flooded After Arctic Permafrost Melts ... ›
• Arctic's Melting Permafrost Will Cost Nearly $70 Trillion, Study Finds ›
• Rapid Melting of Arctic Permafrost Shocks Scientists - EcoWatch ›

• Arctic permafrost is thawing fast. That affects us all. ›
• How Thawing Permafrost Is Beginning to Transform the Arctic - Yale ... ›
• Global impacts of thawing Arctic permafrost may be imminent ... ›

emissionsarcticpermafrostsoilmethaneclimate crisisclimate changeclimate sciencethermokarst

NASA

Permafrost Becoming a Carbon Source Instead of a Sink

View Story

2019-11-19

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145880/permafrost-becoming-a-carbon-source-instead-of-a-sink?src=eoa-iotd

[scary map

https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/145000/145880/arctic_brt_2017_lrg.png]

Winter carbon emissions from Arctic regions appear to be adding more carbon to Earth’s atmosphere each year than is being taken up by Arctic plants and trees. It is a stark reversal for a region that has captured and stored carbon for tens of thousands of years.

In a study published in Nature Climate Change, scientists estimated that 1.7 billion metric tons of carbon were lost from Arctic permafrost regions during each winter from 2003 to 2017. Over the same span, an average of 1 billion metric tons of carbon were taken up by vegetation during summer growing seasons. This changes the region from being a net “sink” of carbon dioxide—where it is captured from the atmosphere and stored—into being a net source of emissions.

Permafrost is the carbon-rich frozen soil that covers about one quarter of Northern Hemisphere land area; it encompasses vast stretches of Alaska, Canada, Siberia, and Greenland. Scientists have estimated that permafrost stores more carbon than has ever been released by humans via fossil fuel combustion. These frozen soils have kept carbon safely locked away for thousands of years, but rising temperatures are making them thaw and release those greenhouse gases.

The map above shows the estimated annual winter (October to April) emissions of carbon dioxide for Arctic permafrost regions from 2003 to 2017. A team of more than 70 researchers compiled ground-based observations of carbon dioxide emissions and combined them with remote sensing data and ecosystem models to assess current and future carbon losses.

“These findings indicate that winter carbon dioxide loss may already be offsetting growing season carbon uptake, and these losses will increase as the climate continues to warm,” said Sue Natali, lead author of the study and a scientist at Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC). “Studies focused on individual sites have seen this transition, but until now we haven’t had a clear accounting of the winter carbon balance throughout the entire Arctic region.”

Natali and colleagues warned that winter carbon dioxide losses from permafrost regions could increase by 41 percent over the next century if human-caused greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current pace. If fossil fuel use is modestly reduced, winter carbon dioxide emissions would increase 17 percent compared with current emissions. Carbon emitted from permafrost has not been included in most models of future climates.

“The warmer it gets, the more carbon will be released into the atmosphere from the permafrost region, which will add to further warming,” said co-author and WHRC scientist Brendan Rogers. “It’s concerning that our study, which used many more observations than ever before, indicates a much stronger Arctic carbon source in the winter. We may be witnessing a transition from an annual Arctic carbon sink to a carbon source, which is not good news.”

The study was supported by NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) and conducted in coordination with the Permafrost Carbon Network and more than 50 collaborating institutions.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using data from Natali, S.M., et al. (2019). NASA photograph of permafrost by Jefferson Beck. Story by Samson Reiny, NASA Earth Science News Team, and Miles Grant, Woods Hole Research Center.

As global and regional warming continues, winter emissions of carbon dioxide from Arctic lands are offsetting what plants absorb in the summer.

Image of the Day for November 19, 2019

References & Resources

• Campbell, J.L. (2019) Arctic loses carbon as winters wane. Nature Climate Change, 9, 806–807.
• Natali, S.M. et al. (2019) Large loss of CO2 in winter observed across the northern permafrost region. Nature Climate Change, 9, 852–857.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2017, January 18) Where Are Arctic Soils Defrosting?
• NASA Earth Observatory (2016, April 12) Why Monitoring Emissions from Permafrost Matters.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2016, April 1) Picturing Arctic Permafrost.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2013, May 26) Arctic Amplification

NASA

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wapo

2°C: Beyond the limit

Siberia’s thawing permafrost

2°C: BEYOND THE LIMIT

Radical warming in Siberia leaves millions on unstable ground

By Anton Troianovski and Chris Mooney

Photo and video by Michael Robinson Chavez

OCT. 3, 2019

ON THE ZYRYANKA RIVER, Russia — Andrey Danilov eased his motorboat onto the gravel riverbank, where the bones of a woolly mammoth lay scattered on the beach. A putrid odor filled the air — the stench of ancient plants and animals decomposing after millennia entombed in a frozen purgatory.

“It smells like dead bodies,” Danilov said.

Click any temperature underlined in the story to convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit

The skeletal remains were left behind by mammoth hunters hoping to strike it rich by pulling prehistoric ivory tusks from a vast underground layer of ice and frozen dirt called permafrost. It has been rapidly thawing as Siberia has warmed up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth. Scientists say the planet's warming must not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius — but Siberia's temperatures have already spiked far beyond that.

Andrey Danilov, a part-time hunter of ancient mammoth tusks, treks through an area of the Zyryanka River in Russia’s Siberia that has been made rich in ivory by thawing permafrost.

A Washington Post analysis found that the region near the town of Zyryanka, in an enormous wedge of eastern Siberia called Yakutia, has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times — roughly triple the global average.

The permafrost that once sustained farming — and upon which villages and cities are built — is in the midst of a great thaw, blanketing the region with swamps, lakes and odd bubbles of earth that render the land virtually useless.

“The warming got in the way of our good life,” said Alexander Fedorov, deputy director of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute in the regional capital of Yakutsk. “With every year, things are getting worse and worse.”

For the 5.4 million people who live in Russia’s permafrost zone, the new climate has disrupted their homes and their livelihoods. Rivers are rising and running faster, and entire neighborhoods are falling into them. Arable land for farming has plummeted by more than half, to just 120,000 acres in 2017.

In Yakutia, an area one-third the size of the United States, cattle and reindeer herding have plunged 20 percent as the animals increasingly battle to survive the warming climate’s destruction of pastureland.

Five-year average of temperature change compared with late 1800s

[graf]

Source: Berkeley Earth

Siberians who grew up learning to read nature’s subtlest signals are being driven to migrate by a climate they no longer understand.

This migration from the countryside to cities and towns — also driven by factors such as low investment and spotty Internet — represents one of the most significant and little-noticed movements to date ofclimate refugees. The city of Yakutsk has seen its population surge 20 percent to more than 300,000 in the past decade.

And then there’s that rotting smell.

As the permafrost thaws, animals and plants frozen for thousands of years begin to decompose and send a steady flow of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere — accelerating climate change.

“The permafrost is thawing so fast,” said Anna Liljedahl, an associate professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “We scientists can’t keep up anymore.”

Against this backdrop, a booming cottage industry in mammoth hunting has taken hold. The long-frozen mammoth tusks — combined with Chinese demand for ivory — have imbued teetering local economies with a strike-it-rich ethos. Some people bask in instant money. But others watch in dismay as Siberia’s way of life is washed away.

Pipes traditionally are built aboveground in Yakutsk, Russia, because of the hard permafrost. As it thaws, it alters Siberia’s landscape as well as the region’s economy.

‘Nature is in control’

The first sign of change was the birds.

Over the past several decades, never-before-seen species started to show up in the Upper Kolyma District, an area on the Arctic Circle in northeastern Siberia 1,000 miles west of Nome, Alaska.

The new arrivals included the mallard duck and barn swallow, whose normal range was previously well to the south. A study published last year by Yakutsk scientist Roman Desyatkin said ornithologists in the region have identified 48 new bird species in the past half century, an increase of almost 20 percent in the known diversity of bird life.

Then the land started to change.

Winters, though still brutal, turned milder — and shorter. Fed by the more rapidly thawing permafrost, rivers started flooding more, leaving some communities inaccessible for months and washing others away, along with the ground beneath them.

The village of Nelemnoye was cut off for three months in late 2017 when the lakes and rivers didn’t fully freeze, stranding residents who use the frozen waters for transport. With the village in crisis, the government dispatched a helicopter to take residents grocery shopping.

Claudia Shalugina, 63, used to teach at the three-story school in Zyryanka, a 90-minute motorboat ride downriver. Around 10 years ago, the Kolyma River washed away a section of Zyryanka, taking Shalugina’s school with it.

The Kolyma River, through the windows of a Siberian hunting lodge.

Andrei Zimzyulin lounges at his fishing camp on the riverbank, where he spends about half of the year.

A decaying bust of Vladi­mir Lenin sits on the riverbank.

Satellite images show the loss of about 50 acres of land along the riverside, according to the geographic information firm Esri.

Smoking a cigarette on the porch of the village library, Shalugina offered her own analysis of the changing climate: “I think, ‘Lord, it’s probably going to be the end of the world.’ ”

Just downstream from where the Zyryanka River flows into the mighty Kolyma, three huge tractor-trailers stand abandoned on the forested riverbank. Weeds and wildflowers rise up around them. The frozen river, used as a winter ice road, suddenly became too risky to drive on.

Spring had come early this year — again.

“It used to be man was in control,” said Pyotr Kaurgin, head of the Chukchi indigenous community in the village of Kolymskoye, on the northern reaches of the Kolyma River. “Now nature is in control.”

In the summer, huge blazes tore through Siberian boreal forests, unleashing yet more carbon into the atmosphere. Some scientists fear worsening northern fires are amplifying the permafrost damage. Meanwhile, six time zones away (but still in Siberia) on the Yamal Peninsula, monstrous craters have opened up in the tundra. Scientists suspect they represent sudden explosions of methane gas freed by thawing permafrost.

Outside Zyryanka, a once-bustling farm has given way to a jumbled landscape of dips, bumps, and puddles. The mud road, what’s left of it, banks and turns at head-spinning angles, until it runs into a widening pond.

“The earth is slowly sinking,” horse farmer Vladi­mir Arkhipov said. “There’s more and more water and less and less usable earth.”

Thawing permafrost turns into mud along the river banks near Zyryanka.

The impact on farming has been catastrophic.

Arkhipov produces fermented mare’s milk called kumys, a delicacy among the Sakha, a Turkic people who make up roughly half the population of Yakutia. Arkhipov also raises foals for meat, which in Sakha culture is sometimes consumed sliced thin, raw and frozen.

In the past five years, Arkhipov said, he has lost close to four of his 70-odd acres of hay fields to permafrost-related flooding — meaning he can feed three fewer horses in the winter. And during a freak blizzard in late 2017 — an increasingly common occurrence in the region as the climate changes, scientists say — 10 of his horses died.

Due to thawing permafrost — along with the demise of Soviet-era state farms — the area of cultivated land in Yakutia has plummeted by more than half since 1990. The region’s cattle herds have shrunk by about 20 percent, to 188,100 head in 2017 from 233,300 in 2011. Reindeer herds have also declined sharply.

Fedorov and other scientists say the degradation of crop and pastureland caused by the thawing permafrost helped bring about the collapse of the region’s agriculture.

Native Yakutian horses graze near the wreckage of a Soviet-era helicopter near Zyryanka. The pasture was part of an airport in the 1980s.

Vladi­mir Arkhipov corrals a horse into a wooden chute. Thawing permafrost is making pastures collapse or become swampland.

A building at a stockyard near Zyryanka illustrates the effects of the shifting ground.

Yegor Prokopyev, the retired head of Nelemnoye, says climate change is the latest shock to befall the Kolyma River region. There was communism and forced collective farming. Then capitalism and government cutbacks.

His grandfather, a peasant, was declared an enemy of the working class and sent to one of this region’s many gulag prison camps.

“As soon as you start getting used to something, they’ll come up with something else, and you have to adapt to everything all over again,” Prokopyev said.

Visitors from the Ice Age

The idea that warming brings disaster is ingrained in the tradition of the Sakha people of Yakutia, the region laced by the Zyryanka and Kolyma rivers. An old Sakha prophecy says: “They will survive until the day when the Arctic Ocean melts.”

Village elders recalled the phrase after an episode of catastrophic flooding in 2005, according to Susan Crate, an anthropologist at George Mason University, who has long studied climate change in Siberia. The radical transformation underway here, she said, should serve as a warning to people in every corner of the globe.

“Changing our ways is imminent,” Crate said.

An airport terminal building in Zyryanka. Severe floods have become more common here, often forcing it to close.

Riverboat workers enjoy a lunch in Zyryanka. Boats and barges are crucial to the area’s economy.

A dog basks in the glow of a late Zyryanka evening — which comes late so close to the Arctic Circle.

Over the past 50 years, temperatures in most of Yakutia have risen at double or even triple the global average rate, according to work by Yakutsk-based scientists Fedorov and Alexey Gorokhov. The town of Zyryanka has warmed by just over 2 degrees Celsius from 1966 to 2016, according to their analysis.

The Post’s analysis, which uses a data set from Berkeley Earth, looks further back. It shows that Zyryanka and the roughly 2,000-square-mile area surrounding it has warmed by more than 3 degrees Celsius when the past five years are compared with the mid- to late 1800s.

Some regions of Siberia bordering on the Arctic Ocean are warming even faster, The Post’s analysis shows.

The region around Zyryanka has seen warming nearly three times the global average

Source: Berkeley Earth

Desyatkin, at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk, found that the changes are even more dramatic underground. From 2005 to 2014, his team found, the number of days with below-freezing temperatures three feet below the surface fell from around 230 days a year to 190.

That is significant because enormous wedges of ice lie under Yakutia.

In some parts of the world, permafrost lies in a relatively thin layer just below the ground’s surface. But in much of Yakutia, the permafrost is of a special, icy and far thicker variety. Scientists call it Yedoma.

Formed during the late Pleistocene, the Earth’s last glacial period, which ended about 11,700 years ago, Yedoma consists of thick layers of soil packed around gigantic lodes of embedded ice. Because Yedoma contains so much ice, it can melt quickly — reshaping the landscape as sudden lakes form and hillsides collapse.

Around Zyryanka, exposed ice wedges glisten along the riverbanks. Their slick, muddy surfaces form ghostly, moonlike grooves. Plant roots dangle like Christmas ornaments from the top layer of soil, left behind as the ice below it melts.

In the 1970s, Desyatkin said, the ground in the Middle Kolyma District, just north of Zyryanka, thawed to a depth of about two feet every summer. Now it thaws to more than three feet. That extra foot of thawing means that, on average, every square mile of territory has been releasing an additional 700,000 gallons of water into the environment every year, according to Desyatkin’s calculations.

Meanwhile, ancient plant and animal remains trapped inside the Yedoma are exposed to nonfreezing temperatures — or even the open air. That, in turn, activates microbes, which break down the remains and unleash carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, especially from the thawing plant material.

Scientists estimate that the Earth’s Yedoma regions contain between 327 billion and 466 billion tons of carbon. Were it all released into the atmosphere, that would amount to more than half of all human-caused emissions from greenhouse gases and deforestation between 1750 and 2011.

At the Yakutsk State Museum of History and Culture, a woman looks at a diorama of a landscape that climate change threatens to alter forever.

Prospecting for mammoth

Although the thawing of these ancient remains raises the threat of terrifying consequences, it is, for some, the bright side of climate change.

“The thawing of the permafrost has a very good effect. The mammoth bone comes out and brings us money,” said Yevgeny Konstantinov, a newspaper editor in the Arctic town of Saskylakh. “Everyone rides Jeeps now.”

In recent years, demand from China has created a booming market for mammoth ivory. People in Yakutia collected almost 80 tons in 2017, according to official figures — a likely undercount, experts say. A Yakutia official recently estimated annual sales to be as high as $63 million.

Listen on Post Reports: Siberia’s melting permafrost

As the permafrost thaws and riverbanks erode, more tusks will emerge. Though mammoths disappeared from the Siberian mainland some 10,000 years ago, the government estimates that 500,000 tons of their tusks are still buried in the frozen ground.

Supply and demand are so great that some people are collecting mammoth tusks at near-industrial scale. They use high-pressure hoses to blast away riverbanks and hire teams of young men to comb the wilderness for months at a time. People involved in the business, which isn’t entirely legal, said some tusk prospectors have deployed underwater cameras and scuba gear.

Mammoth bones that could be tens of thousands of years old are strewn near the Kolyma River. They probably were discarded by poachers in favor of valuable tusks.

“You get bit once, you catch the bug. It’s like a gold rush,” said Alexey Sivtsev, a prospector in Zyryanka who said he is licensed to collect tusks. In the glutted market, Sivtsev said, the price for top-quality tusks has fallen from about $500 a pound five years ago to around $180.

According to Sakha tradition, tusk hunting violates the sacred ground and brings bad tidings. Some Siberians worry that it also draws young people into an underworld linked to organized crime.

“Since all this is connected to criminality, I’m worried that this mafia, as we call it, is getting a basis for existing in our villages,” said Vyacheslav Shadrin, who studies northern indigenous peoples at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Yakutsk.

Konstantin Gusev, a hunter in Nelemnoye, is still waiting for his mammoth payday.

Once, he found the tusk of an ancient woolly rhinoceros but threw it away. He later learned that such a find sells for $7,000 a pound, making it among the most valuable animal remains buried underground.

Gusev now has his eye on a strip of riverbank where he found a mammoth tooth. He invested in a water pump and hose to try to uncover what’s underneath.

Vanda Ignatyeva, a Yakutsk sociologist, said climate change is leaving people with few choices. “They have to somehow support and feed their families.”

Drone video from Churapcha, Russia, shows land warped by thawing permafrost. (Melnikov Permafrost Institute)

‘Trying to survive’

The mammoths aren’t enough to keep Gusev in the countryside, however. The hunter said he is moving to Yakutsk to look for other kinds of work.

The ducks and geese are just about gone, he said, possibly moving to new habitats in Siberia as the climate shifts. The sable pelts aren’t as thick as they used to be. The shorter winters mean that once reliably frozen-over lakes and rivers are now less predictable, making hunting grounds harder to reach and restricting his ability to get goods to market.

“Something is changing,” Gusev said. “People are sitting around, trying to survive.”

In Nelemnoye, the population has declined to 180 from 210 in the past decade, according to village head Andrei Solntsev. Just 82 of the residents have work. Many factors are pushing people to move to the city — lack of Internet access, poor flight connections, limited job opportunities — but the uncertainty born of a changing climate looms over everything.

“We’re already seeing the phenomenon of climate refugees,” Shadrin said.

But “it’s not like anyone is waiting for them here” in the city, he said. “No one is ready to help them immediately. .?.?. They’re breaking away, becoming marginals.”

And Yakutsk offers no escape from the warming climate.

A boy rides his bike near the main road of Nelemnoye, Russia — population 180.

Innokenty Dyachkov pulls a pike out of a tub in Nelemnoye. Hunting and fishing are the lifeblood of the village.

Children play on the banks of the Kolyma River in Zyryanka.

As the permafrost thaws and recedes, a handful of apartment buildings there are showing signs of structural problems. Sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground — rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth. New apartment blocks are being built on massive pylons extending ever deeper — more than 40 feet — below ground.

“The cold is our protection,” Yakutsk Mayor Sardana Avksentyeva said. “This isn’t a man-made catastrophe yet, but it’ll be unavoidable if things continue at this pace.”

An international team of scientists, led by Dmitry A. Streletskiy at George Washington University, estimated in a study published this year that the value of buildings and infrastructure on Russian permafrost amounts to $300 billion — about 7.5 percent of the nation’s total annual economic output. They estimate the cost of mitigating the damage wrought by thawing permafrost will probably total more than $100 billion by 2050.

But people here are used to adapting. They survived the forced collectivization of the early Soviet Union. Gulag prisoners taught them to grow potatoes. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the state farms closed, they shifted to a greater reliance on hunting and fishing.

Now, Anatoly Sleptsov, 61, is once again embracing change.

The pastures of the village where he used to live have turned into swamps and lakes. So he moved to firmer ground outside Zyryanka, where he’s leveraging climate change to his advantage.

Though Sleptsov’s attempt to create an Israeli-style kibbutz failed, he figures the region can profit by marketing Omega 3 fatty acids extracted from its fish.

Meanwhile, his potatoes are flowering earlier. And this year, he started growing strawberries.

“Next thing,” he said, “we’ll have watermelon.”

In an effort to embrace climate change, Antonina Sleptsova and her family have begun growing strawberries at their small farm outside Zyryanka.

John Muyskens contributed to this report.

Editing by Trish Wilson and Brian Murphy. Design and development by Madison Walls. Graphics by John Muyskens and Harry Stevens. Graphics editing by Monica Ulmanu. Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Video graphics by William Neff. Video editing by Peter Stevenson. Copy editing by Brian Malasics. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya.

Data from Berkeley Earth was accessed September 19.

Anton Troianovski

Anton Troianovski is a former Moscow bureau chief for The Post

Chris Mooney

Chris Mooney covers climate change, energy, and the environment. He has reported from the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, the Northwest Passage, and the Greenland ice sheet, among other locations, and has written four books about science, politics and climate change.

Michael Robinson Chavez

Michael Robinson Chavez, a staff photographer, recently won a Robert F. Kennedy Award for his coverage of social problems created by the drug trade plaguing Mexico. In 2018 he covered the rise of autocracy in Eastern Europe.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/boiling-with-methane-scientists-reveal-truly-terrifying-sign-of-climate-change-under-the-arctic-ocean

no lnx

‘Boiling with methane’: Scientists reveal ‘truly terrifying’ sign of climate change under the Arctic Ocean

A spectacular image of methane bubbles rising above a cold seep site. Methane bubbles flow in a small stream out of the sediment on an area of seafloor offshore Virginia north of Washington Canyon. Quill worms, anemones, patches of bacterial mat, pandalid shrimp, and a large red crab (Chaceon quinquedens) can be seen in and along the periphery of the seepage area.

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams October 9, 2019

Scientists studying the consequences of methane emissions from underwater permafrost in the Arctic Ocean announced this week that they found a 50-square-foot area of the East Siberian Sea “boiling with methane bubbles.”

“This is the most powerful seep I have ever been able to observe,” lead scientist Igor Semiletov said Monday, using a term for methane gas bubbling up from the seafloor to the surface. “No one has ever recorded anything similar.”

Semiletov, a Russian researcher who has participated in 45 Arctic expeditions, set out on the Academic Mstislav Keldysh last month, accompanied by scientists from the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Their discovery was announced in a statement from Russia’s Tomsk Polytechnic University, where Semiletov is a professor. The researchers’ findings from the expedition and Semiletov’s remarks were translated and reported on Tuesday by The Telegraph.

Russian scientists find ‘most powerful’ ever methane seep in Arctic Ocean https://t.co/v6HrbjPlXv

— Telegraph World News (@TelegraphWorld) October 8, 2019

Permafrost is a mix of soil, rocks, and sand bound together by ice that stays frozen for two or more years straight. As human activity causes global temperatures to rise, the world’s permafrost is thawing—releasing ancient bacteria and viruses as well as greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that further heat the planet.

Compared with carbon dioxide, methane has a shorter lifetime in the atmosphere but is better at trapping radiation, so methane’s impact is more than 25 times greater than that of carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Experts are increasingly concerned about the consequences of thawing permafrost that is located both beneath land and water in the planet’s coldest regions. Last week, the Washington Post reported on “stunning and dramatic” scenes from a region of Eastern Siberia where “sections of many older, wooden buildings already sag toward the ground—rendered uninhabitable by the unevenly thawing earth,” and “rivers are rising and running faster,” sweeping away entire neighborhoods.

The Academic Mstislav Keldysh expedition’s research team, led by Semiletov, traveled to an area of the Arctic Ocean known for methane “fountains” to study the effects of permafrost thawing. Around the “powerful” fountain they found east of Bennett Island, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere was more than nine times higher than the global average.

Describing the researchers’ discovery of the fountain based on the univeristy’s statement, The Telegraph reported:

When researchers drew near to the “emerald-colored” water of the methane fountain, they “could see how gas was rising to the surface from the black depths of the sea in thousands of bubbly strands,” according to expedition member Sergei Nikiforov.

They took samples of bottom sediments, water, and gas, scooping up the extraordinarily large methane bubbles in buckets rather than small plastic capsules and filling several pressurized canisters.

The next day, the expedition stumbled upon another giant seep of roughly the same size, even though discovering seeps among rough ocean waves is usually “harder than finding a needle in a haystack,” Mr. Nikiforov said.

The expedition’s findings, also reported on Tuesday by Newsweek, elicited alarmed reactions from readers and climate activists the world over:

Our seas are starting to ‘boil’ — with methane. This is not normal. #ClimateCrisis #ArcticMatters #UniteBehindTheScience https://t.co/ATk7IzFuSi

— Callum Grieve (@callumgrieve) October 9, 2019

Oh, fuck. https://t.co/OnwCW2rL2c

— Ray Monk (@Raymodraco) October 8, 2019

A New Zealand chapter of the Extinction Rebellion movement—which launched a fresh wave of peaceful acts of civil disobedience around the world on Monday to demand bolder climate policies—tweeted in response to the expedition’s discovery, “This is why the disruption we caused is very minor in comparison to what’s coming.”

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Arctic death spiral speeds up sixfold, driving coastal permafrost collapse

JOE ROMM

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Drone surveys have revealed erosion of coastal permafrost in the Arctic — up to 3 feet a day. Researchers reported Friday that the recent rate of erosion is six times higher than the historical rate.

Meanwhile, the Arctic just saw the hottest May on record, with temperatures in northwest Russia hitting a remarkable 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius). Global warming is driving Arctic sea ice to near-record lows, which in turn is driving ever-worsening summer heat waves in the southern United States, according to another new study.

In the first study, a team led by University of Edinburgh scientists flew drone-mounted cameras over a section of permafrost coastline in the Canadian Arctic.

They found that during a 40-day period in the summer of 2017, the coast had retreated a remarkable 47 feet — with daily rates of collapse sometimes exceeding 3 feet,

"Big chunks of soil and ground break off the coastline every day, then fall into the waves and get eaten away,” co-author Dr. Isla Myers-Smith, a University of Edinburgh geoscientist, explained.

This rate of erosion was more than six times greater than the historical average experienced in the previous half century.

The most dangerous climate feedback loop is speeding up

In Siberia, the carbon-rich permafrost warmed by 1.6°F in just the last decade.

The permafrost, or tundra, is soil that stays below freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit) for at least two years. Thawing permafrost is a dangerous amplifying feedback loop for global warming because the global permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmospheredoes today .

As the permafrost melts, it releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane, and as the coastline disintegrates and erodes, more and more permafrost will be exposed to the warming air and water.

This means, as the planet continues to warm, more permafrost will erode and melt, releasing even more greenhouse gases in a continuous feedback loop.

A 2017 study found the Alaskan tundra is warming so quickly it had become a net emitter of CO2 ahead of schedule. That study was the first to report a major portion of the Arctic had already become a net source of heat-trapping emissions.

As the Arctic warms, the ice retreats — and the recent record Arctic temperatures have led to the second lowest amount of sea ice on record for June (after 2016).

[scry dialongal down graf]

ARCTIC SEA ICE EXTENT (IN MILLIONS OF SQUARE KILOMETERS). CREDIT: ZACH LABE.

Such ice loss is a key reason climate models have long predicted that human-caused warming would be at least twice as fast in the Arctic as elsewhere. When highly reflective sea ice melts due to higher temperatures, it is replaced by the dark blue sea which absorbs more solar energy, leading to more melting.

A study released last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research found that loss of Arctic sea ice is making extreme heat waves more likely. The study concludes that “low summer sea ice in Hudson Bay is statistically linked to an increased frequency of summer U.S. heat waves,” especially in the U.S. Southeast and southern Plains.

The study also finds that the melting sea ice is weakening the jet stream. A weaker jet stream causes summer weather systems to stall, leading to longer and stronger heat waves — and other extreme events, as recent studies have reported.

Back in December, the annual Arctic Report Card from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) noted that “Growing atmospheric warmth in the Arctic results in a sluggish and unusually wavy jet-stream that coincided with abnormal weather events in both the Arctic and mid-latitudes.”

What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. Unless we start cutting carbon pollution sharply and rapidly, we can expect Arctic temperatures to soar in the coming decades, bringing ever worsening extreme weather to this country.

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Permafrost Is Warming Around the Globe, Study Shows

:{BY: BOB BERWYN

Rapid changes in the long-frozen soil are raising concerns about a surge of planet-warming greenhouse gases as the permafrost thaws.}: Read More