Triple threat
Thawing Arctic permafrost laden with billions of tons of greenhouse gases [threatens not only] the region’s critical infrastructure but life across the planet, according [to] a comprehensive scientific review.
Nearly 70% of the roads, pipelines, cities and industry — mostly in Russia — built on the region’s softening ground are highly vulnerable to acute damage by mid-century, according to one of half-a-dozen studies on permafrost published this week by Nature.
Another study warns that methane and CO2 escaping from long-frozen soil could accelerate warming and overwhelm global efforts to cap the rise in Earth’s temperature at livable levels.
Exposure of highly combustible organic matter no longer locked away by ice is also fueling unprecedented wildfires, making permafrost a triple threat, the studies report.
The second item is the scariest – it means the whole thing could race off out of control and…well, don’t look up, I guess.
The feedback loops are looping.
Rising temperatures are not the only driver of accelerated melting.
Arctic wildfires rapidly expand the layer of permafrost subject to thawing, the researchers point out.
As the climate warms, these remote, uncontrolled blazes are projected to increase 130% to 350% by mid-century, releasing more and more permafrost carbon.
Indeed, thawing renders buried organic carbon more flammable, giving rise to “zombie fires” that smolder throughout frigid winters before igniting again in Spring and Summer.
We’ve cooked it.
I’m honestly starting to hope the gulf stream collapses. It’ll have disasterous consequences for sure (not least for me as I live in Britain) but it will cool the whole arctic region, potentially halting the melting of the permafrost. The last time the gulf stream shut down – the younger dryas – it was pretty bad for Europe, but it was far from a mass extinction. By contrast the runaway release of methane from the permafrost and, even worse, from cathaldrate deposits under the sea could potentially cuase a rerun of the Permian mass extinction. Given the unlikelyhood of us taking effective action on climate change, I’ll take the lesser of two evils, even if it means I and nearly everyone I know ends up dying in a Siberian-scale winter.
Mass extinction looks more and more like the likely outcome. It’s grim.
I’m not a climate scientist, but my professional work is in control theoretic modeling of real, nonlinear systems. It’s difficult to underscore just how frightening a positive feedback runaway can be; the results are catastrophic for the system in question, even for small things. For example, induction motors form the basis of modern processing engineering, so their function and use are taught in most electrical engineering programs. One aspect of these motors is that when they are running, if one opens the field circuit while the driving circuit is still energized, the torque of the rotor becomes infinite (in theory), because the field acts as a negative feedback control mechanism. Some years ago I witnessed what this really means when a student did exactly this to a half-ton induction motor bolted to the floor of a lab with one-inch bolts: in a matter of seconds it tore itself free of its anchors and proceeded to fly around the room, wreaking devastation to every inch of it; it was only by sheer luck that nobody was hurt or killed.
Now scale that scene in your mind up to the entire planetary climate: that’s what we’re facing. This is why climate scientists often seem to use such hyperbolic language, but what is frustrating is that due to the nonlinear nature of the overall system they cannot make accurate predictions of when this will happen. All we can really say about such systems is that when the bad stuff truly gets going, it’s going to get really bad, really fast.
[…] a comment by James Garnett on Triple […]
At least one anthrax outbreak has started from a dead reindeer thawed from permafrost.
I think that the potential for havoc wreaked from thawed microlife such as viruses is very alarming. The way I understand viruses, freezing does not “kill” them,