The sad pile of ice and snow
Iceland has lost its first glacier to rising temperatures. Now, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to install a plaque near the sad pile of ice and snow formerly known as Ok Glacier. The researchers say it’s the first memorial to a disappearing glacier, but climate change ensures it almost certainly will not be the last.
Glaciers are more than just ice. They’re defined by receiving more mass from snow than they lose from summer melt, which allows them to slide down mountains and grind up rock. Climate change has, of course, changed the equation by causing more glacial melting, causing ice to recede around the world. An increasing number of glaciers have turned into stagnant, rotten ice patches or disappeared completely. The OK Glacier reached the latter status in 2014, making it the first glacier in Iceland to disappear. Researchers expect all glaciers to melt away by 2200 on the island, which led to them memorializing Ok.
Meanwhile, much of the Arctic is on fire.
Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that are being seen by satellites.
Gizmodo has some extraordinary photographs of the fires.
Intense hot conditions have also fanned flames in Siberia. The remote nature of many of the fires there means they’re burning out of control, often, through swaths of peatland that’s normally frozen or soggy. But as Thomas Smith, a fire expert at London School of Economics, noted on Twitter, there are ample signs the peat dried out due to the heat and is ablaze. That’s worrisome since peat is rich in carbon, and fires can release it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
And that’s worrisome because it means that the warming could speed up much more than was predicted, eating up that vague generation or two that seemed to give the world time to start planting trees and stop electing trumps.
All told, northern fires released as much carbon dioxide in June as the entire country of Sweden does in a year, according to data crunched by the European Union’s Copernicus program. The agency said the wildfire activity is “unprecedented” amidst what was, incidentally, the hottest June ever recorded for the planet with the Arctic particularly sweltering. All that carbon dioxide released by fires represents one of the scarier feedback loops of climate change as hot weather ensures more fires, which releases carbon dioxide and makes climate change worse.
Scarier indeed.
Annnnd the deniers will point at the fires and say “See carbon released by natural processes, not man made”, ignoring that the fire ripe conditions arose from man made activity in the first place.
Peat has long been used as fuel because of its slow, long-burning properties. Perfect for the hearth, but a nightmare to control as a wildfire. Unlike a ‘normal’ wildfire, where it’s just the surface that burns, the peat will burn down as well as spreading across the surface, and it will burn as deep as the peat layer has defrosted and dried. Even if the surface layer is extinguished it can smoulder away underground for years. That, of course, will keep the surface too warm for fresh ice to form come winter, so what was until very recently permafrost is in real danger of becoming a sub-surface ‘permafire’, with a wet and boggy cover in winter which will dry out in summer.
Basically, the permafrost is likely gone for good.
The permafrost is likely gone for good and what that means is that the release of carbon dioxide will be massively increased, which I assume means in turn that climate change will be massively speeded up. It’s horrifying.
Yeah. What control theory calls “positive feedback”. Basically the opposite of what one wants in a stable system. When you’re going too fast you want to brake, not accelerate.