Tempafrost
Siberia is hot. Not just hot for Siberia, but hot – which makes it terrifyingly hot for Siberia.
It’s not just the Western region of the US that’s sweltering right now. Siberia in Russia is baking, and satellites are bearing witness to a brutal heat wave above the Arctic Circle. Copernicus Sentinel-3A and Sentinel-3B satellites captured a snapshot of land surface temperatures on June 20, and it was hot.
According to NASA, “Land surface temperature is how hot the ‘surface’ of the Earth would feel to the touch in a particular location.” The Sentinel image shows a peak ground temperature of 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) near Verkhojansk, a small town usually known for its extreme cold temperatures.
Siberia is where the permafrost is, and from what I recall, if the permafrost melts that’s another massive tipping point because it will release colossal amounts of methane. In other words the planet is doomed.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space, which implements the Copernicus program, tweeted that the town of Saskylah saw air temperatures of about 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) on June 20, the highest on record there since 1936.
Not Texas, not Australia, but Siberia.
I do work in Canada’s North. The tundra is not very different from Siberia’s taiga. These days, if you take a shovel to the ground, you can smell methane – first time I was up there, that was permafrost.
As Naif alludes,
is no longer a meaningful statement. Huge tracts of permafrost in Siberia and Canada are already gone, and the rest is going fast.
That’s what I meant. “if the permafrost melts [and it is!!!] that’s another massive tipping point because it will release colossal amounts of methane. In other words the planet is doomed.”