The temperature in Siberia reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit

Interview by Bobby Bascomb, Living on Earth, July 15, 2020

Siberia hit a record-high temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit on June 20 in the town of Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle. Scientists say it is an ominous sign of things to come. “I was shocked at the magnitude of it …” says Susan Natali, Arctic program director at Woods Hole Research Center.

The town of Verkhoyansk in Siberia hit a record-high temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit on June 20, the highest temperature ever recorded within the Arctic Circle — and scientists are worried.

“I was shocked at the magnitude of it, but perhaps not necessarily completely surprised to see these types of spikes in temperature because this has been happening for a number of years now.”

“I was shocked at the magnitude of it, but perhaps not necessarily completely surprised to see these types of spikes in temperature because this has been happening for a number of years now,” says Susan Natali, Arctic program director at Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “The average temperature for June [was] 68 degrees Fahrenheit, so it’s quite a bit warmer than the average.”

The Arctic is warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the planet. This is due primarily to a phenomenon called regional amplification, Natali says.

Sea ice is a white surface that reflects the sun’s energy; seawater is a dark surface that absorbs the sun’s energy. The energy absorbed by surface water gets slowly released into the Arctic, causing the regional amplifying effect, Natali explains.

This feedback loop will continue to create more and more warming in the future, which will affect both the region’s sea ice and, perhaps more alarming, its permafrost — that is, the soil that is typically frozen year-round. If the Arctic melts and releases all that carbon, suddenly the global carbon budget looks a lot more difficult to achieve.

Permafrost soil, which is basically peat, holds more carbon dioxide than all of the world’s rainforests. If the Arctic melts and releases all that carbon, suddenly the global carbon budget — the amount of carbon the world’s nations can release in order to keep global warming below 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius — looks a lot more difficult to achieve.

“Carbon emissions as a result of permafrost thaw are essentially going to use up anywhere from 25 to 40% of our remaining fossil fuel emissions budget,” Natali explains. “So it’s going to make it really challenging to keep to these temperature targets that were set out in these international climate agreements.”

Permafrost thaws in a couple of different ways, Natali says. There’s gradual thaw when permafrost thaws from the top down, and abrupt thaw, which occurs at extreme temperatures and can lead to complete ground collapse. A single summer like the one affecting the region can now lead to rapid thawing that is measured in tens of meters per year, instead of centimeters per year.

During these extremely warm summer months, the area also gets very dry, which raises the risk of wildfire, Natali adds. Wildfire, in turn, places the permafrost at greater risk because it removes the insulation that the ground provides.

There is also a phenomenon in the Arctic called “zombie fires,” which sounds like something out of a science fiction film but is quite real.

“There’s so much organic matter below the ground that the fires in the Arctic don’t just burn vegetation above ground, they burn peat in the organic material below ground,” Natali explains. “So, you can see a fire burning in August and September below ground, and then it resurfaces…in the spring. It just had been smoldering throughout the winter below the ground.”

Thawing permafrost recently made international headlines when an oil tank collapsed in the town of Norilsk, creating an environmental mess that could take 10 years to clean up.

The oil tank collapse got a lot of attention because of its magnitude, but communities in the far north are dealing with impacts of thawing permafrost on their infrastructure all the time, Natali says.

“The ground structure in the Arctic is maintained because there’s frozen ground below it, but when the ice that’s in the permafrost melts you get ground collapse, you get subsidence, you can get very extreme, abrupt events,” Natali says. “But even gradual events are enough to cause cracks in a building, or to cause gas tanks or other types of infrastructure to fall and to crack, and this is what’s happening in some areas of the Arctic.”

“These other incidents that don’t get these big headlines are really concerning because they are impacting people’s cultures and their health and their livelihoods,” she adds.

Many of us still tend to think about climate change as something that’s going to happen in the future, in 2050 or 2100, but in the Arctic, it’s happening now.

Many of us still tend to think about climate change as something that’s going to happen in the future, in 2050 or 2100, but in the Arctic, it’s happening now, Natali says.

“There are people being impacted by this now and there’s infrastructure that’s being impacted by this now,” she warns, “There are global implications for permafrost thaw and there are feedbacks on global climate that may be happening now and are expected to continue to happen into the future. But there are also these regional impacts, as you see ground collapsing on the people who are living in the Arctic.”

Natali does not like to think of climate change as an insurmountable problem, but some regions of the Arctic have already experienced “pretty extreme permafrost thaw,” she says.

“The actions that we take now in terms of our fossil fuel emissions will really have a big difference on how much of the Arctic will thaw and how many of these communities will be impacted, and how much economic cost there will be,” she cautions. “So it’s not an all or nothing situation in the Arctic. It’s recognizing that, yes, we’ve already bought in for some of these changes that are already happening [and] that are going to happen, but let’s act now and act soon to reduce that impact for people in the Arctic and globally.”

>>>>> This article is based on an interview by Bobby Bascomb that aired on Living on Earth from PRX.

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Related: Melting polar ice poses a serious global risk, November 11, 2017

Related: A bold plan to slow the melt of Arctic permafrost could help reverse global warming, April 30, 2017

New environmental threats generating more greenhouse methane into the earth’s atmosphere

Article by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

Those of us who follow the science of global warming realize it is not a simple thing. It involves many phenomena. It involves some that are very important but are far from everyday concerns, such as the currents of the ocean. Many more keep turning up. Here are a couple that are new.

Deserts everywhere have a “biocrust” or Biological Soil Crust, sometimes known as microbiotic crust. We tend to think of deserts as places which have few or no plants, and hence no life. Not so, biologists tell us. In time, even the most arid areas develop a layer of life from one eighth of an inch thick to several inches thick. They are valuable to consolidate the surface and prevent soil from moving in wind and as a result of occasional rains. Unfortunately, biocrusts are rather delicate compared to soil cover by vascular plants.

Biocrusts are composed of complex mixtures of cyanobacteria, moss, lichens, bacteria and fungi. They are driven by photosynthesis and rare rains. They have the ability to desiccate (dry up completely) and come to life again quickly when a rain occurs. They remove carbon dioxide from the air and replace it with oxygen. They fix nitrogen from the air, and support further growth, in part by securing necessary nutrients from the arid soil and by binding sand grains together. Perhaps one of the most important attributes from the human point of view is they reduce or prevent dust storms.

The composition of biocrusts varies from place to place on the earth’s surface, and by different soil conditions in any local area. They are vulnerable to trampling. A footfall may take 10 years to recover, and much longer, up to 250 years where it is very dry. Now, as scientists who study them are finding out, changes in temperature and rainfall also jeopardize them. They are a global warming problem in the western United States and from the high latitudes to the Sahara and Ecuador.

A good short article about biocrusts in Arizona in particular is here.

Pictures of biocrusts are here and here. The second has two videos of how desert mosses can turn green in less than a minute when they are rehydrated by rain or pouring on water! The fuzzy object in the foreground of the second is an eyedropper, and you can see the individual plants!

The second threat of our article is methane release from melting permafrost. You may have heard of that before, but it is a continuing and increasing concern. Human carbon dioxide release depends largely on burning hydrocarbon fuels, although some other industrial scale processes also release it. This is directly attributable to intentional human activity.

Methane has an industrial component also, due to leaks in production, which increases with greater use of methane for fuel. However, the biggest worry is uncontrollable natural release from melting permafrost. Permafrost is the layer of frozen earth characteristic of the far north and a few other places where the temperature has been below freezing most of the tine. For a map of location see here, click on small map to the right for an enlargement.

The area of permafrost is huge, about 24% of the ice free land area of the northern hemisphere. Entrapped in this frozen earth and water is vegetation, which slowly rots and produces methane in the absence of air, and methane rising from the deep toward the surface is trapped here, too, since the beginning of the last ice age, 25,000 years ago.

The first reference in this section has in the middle of the page two graphs, one of the average annual temperature at a selected point in Siberia in red and a second of Bonanza Creek, near Fairbanks, Alaska. Much of this area is thawing, releasing the methane. The Arctic is warming twice as fast the Equatorial Region.

The worry is what is called “positive feedback,” an uncontrollable forward change in a process which results from the change itself. In this case, warming causes methane to be released and even more, uncontrollable warming, out of proportion to the human activity.

This article states that methane equivalent to 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide could be released by the melting of permafrost. This alone could contribute an extra half degree of warming, according to a study it mentions. This is a low estimate compared to some that are out there.

Here are pictures of holes in permafrost, most of them the result of escaping gases. The prospect is horrifying, both for the residents where it occurs but looking forward to the future of a hot earth with many consequences!

Technical Description by J.W. (Bill) Rymer, July 28, 2013

There has been very intense recent interest in increased permafrost exposure and resulting release of greenhouse gases. Based on a very short search and my own experience, I will cite some examples of Remote Sensing (RS) and then draw a few conclusions regarding permafrost investigations using RS.

The technology for Remote Sensing has been growing rapidly since the mid 1960’s when agricultural remote sensing research at Purdue University led to the early NASA LANDSAT family of satellites.[1] Many schools and researchers are engaged in remote sensing world-wide. Sensors include multi-spectral scanners, hyper spectral scanning and ground penetrating radar among others. The Laboratory for Agricultural Remote Sensing (LARS) at Purdue remains very active and involves many researchers and disciplines.[2]

LANDSAT has been used to map global methane distribution. See ref. [3] which shows on pp. 16 a global / macro scale map of CH4 concentration. While this was just a macro scale, the sensors involved had 200 meter or better resolution using 2005 data. No doubt the sensors and available data products for the newer Landsat8 are much better. Other satellites such as IKONOS (commercial earth observation satellite launched in 1999) have additional sensors and varied applications. IKONOS collects publically available (for sale) imagery at 1 and 4 meter resolution according to the relevant WIKI page.

Students at Kansas University have applied inexpensive versions of ground penetrating radar to map the depth of glaciers from a light plane rather than expensive, tedious and inherently misleading small-sample drilling. It appears very likely that the same technology could be used to map permafrost both under land and under water. It should be feasible to map not only location but depth. It seems very analogous (investigation of permafrost vs investigation of glaciers) in that overview information is needed, yet far more localized than “pictures of the earth” in scale.

At least 50 non-military sensors are currently in orbit around the earth gathering a wide variety of data. These thematic mappers take images based on many frequencies/wavelengths. LANDSAT8 was launched 2/11/13 and free data distribution was to begin 5/31/13. I have not obtained specifications as to what sensors and resolutions are available on LANDSAT8.

Australians [4] have developed reflected laser technology for allowing methane detection over large areas. It would seem that this opens possible future scanning of permafrost areas looking for methane leaks or vent holes. Such technology would likely be more applicable to low altitude platforms (aircraft) rather than satellites due to the range limitations of lasers.

The Univ. of Bremen in Germany [5] has already utilized European ENVISAT data from as early 2004 to map CH4 concentrations on a global scale.

An excellent overview of hyper-spectral imaging is at the Wiki location [6] . This site mentions use of the tools for chemical imaging, mining, etc. Of great interest are tools such as applications within MATLAB that were already developed for analyzing and displaying such data.

In a 2008 example, the University of Alaska has a Permafrost Laboratory and published a paper titled “Changing Permafrost Landscapes in North Eurasia; Some Remote Sensing Observations and Challenges.” [7] This paper involves researchers from the US, Germany, Russia, Canada and others. Clearly work is already being done in this area. Slide 9 in this paper alludes to large numbers of “key parameters” that can be measured using RS. However, most if not all are macro effects rather than narrow specifics like methane leakage spots. Slide 25 shows a network of Lake-ice Methane Monitoring sites which looks to me like an admission that RS has not yet been fully applied. Regardless, I think this is a must-read paper for those interested in permafrost issues.

Other publications of interest include “Remote Sensing in Northern Hydrology: Measuring Environmental Change” 160 pp. in hardback, edited by Duqua and Pietroniro. My impression is that the book deals more with gross large area features than with specific artifacts like methane vent holes.

It should be noted that analysis of data already gathered by LANDSAT, IKONOS, ENVISAT and other platforms has by no stretch of the imagination been exhausted. Instead, analysis is driven by specific funded projects and objectives within NASA, private corporations, Universities and numerous research organizations. Thus the “data products” (maps, readily usable visual materials, etc.) as results of processing sensor data are by no means complete or exhaustive. It would be foolish to assume that the all the data has been “used up.” Instead the data products and published results are merely samples of what can be derived from the raw data. Certainly all responsible organizations involved retain the raw data for future research.

From the above examples and extensive remote sensing technology in existence, I conclude that:

1. Remote Sensing on regions or relatively large geographic areas (less than global) can be used to map permafrost and similar subsurface features. This has probably been done.

2. Effective permafrost studies should be done on much smaller samples (e.g. miles x miles rather than earth-sized) compared to most of the highly publicized “view of the earth” data products. Higher resolution is required than that aimed at “global pictures.” Investigation of sensor specifications (and metadata regarding what has already been collected) should reveal whether the resolution is adequate or whether other sensors should be launched. Inexpensive scanning platforms (such as light planes) seem attractive.

3. It is very likely that the raw data already exists to do detailed (versus global) permafrost mapping and investigations. Since my search has been short and cursory, I would be very surprised if some detailed permafrost investigations have not already been done, especially in areas like Alaska.

4. Methane vents and leaks should be detectable using existing technology. Methods could be tested and proven using existing data (if this has not already been done.)

5. A key area for further investigation would be finding out whether spectrometers and similar devices used to detect specific elements and compounds on distant astronomic targets have been used to scan permafrost areas. If they have, then detection of methane vents should be a relatively simple data processing chore.

6. An early effort should focus on finding out to what extent permafrost has already been targeted by funded research and data analysis, what tools have been used, and the extent of existing RS applications to permafrost.

J.W. (Bill) Rymer, BSEE, West Va. Univ. ’66, MSEE, Purdue ’67. Mr. Rymer managed the first Real-time Telemetry Processing System (RTPS) in the Department of Defense. He maintained a specialty in spectrum analysis and vibration for most of his career. He currently works part-time for Spiral Technology Corp. and the Office of the Secretary of Defense on Network Enhanced Telemetry. The longstanding family farm is in Lewis County.

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[1] See Brief History of LARS by David Landgrebe, Dec. 1986 at http://www.lars.purdue.edu/home/LARSHistory.html

[2] See http://www.lars.purdue.edu/ .

[3] See the following document: http://landsat.usgs.gov/documents/Jan_2010_Landsat_Science_Team_meeting_Jan2010_Hoersch_Final-short.pdf

[4] See http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/search/site/methane

[5] See http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/arep/gaw/documents/4.6_Sat_Burrows.pdf

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspectral_imaging

[7] “Changing Permafrost Landscapes in North Eurasia: Some Remote Sensing Observations and Challenges By Guido Grosse, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks at http://permafrost.gi.alaska.edu/sites/default/files/users/ggrosse/10_Grosse_surface_morphology.pdf

Permafrost Releases Methane

THE JOKER – Permafrost

 By. S. Tom Bond, Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

There are two phenomena in the Arctic, that bode evil for the future: loss of arctic sea ice and melting permafrost. I’ve read a lot, and it seems no one has a quantitative idea about what will happen when the arctic sea ice cover melts. The absence of ice will let sunlight penetrate the surface and warm the water, rather than being reflected back into space. With ice 80% of the energy is reflected back into space, 20% is absorbed, going into warming the ice and the air above it. With open sea, 80% of the energy is absorbed.

This has the potential of changing both currents in the ocean and in the air, because both water and air become less dense as they warm, and the driver for currents in both is displacement of warm air by cold air and warm water by cold water.

Our present weather pattern is caused by greater warming of the arctic, causing the stratospheric jet stream to move slower and to have north and south meanders several times the amplitude they had previously. This brings arctic weather over a southern area for some longer time, then tropic weather further north, with thunder storms and tornadoes between the regions having different temperatures.

The real joker, though, the great unknown, is permafrost. Permafrost is defined as ground (soil or rock and included ice or organic material) that remains frozen for at least two consecutive years. Permafrost zones occupy up to 24 per cent of the exposed land area of the Northern Hemisphere. Permafrost is also common within the vast offshore continental shelves of the Arctic Ocean. This subsea permafrost formed during the last glacial period when global sea levels were more than 300 feet lower than at present and the shelves were exposed to very harsh climate conditions. Subsea permafrost is slowly thawing at many locations. Permafrost of various temperatures and continuity also exists in mountainous areas, due to the cold climate at high elevations. (By clicking on “permafrost” in the first line of this paragraph one accesses a great map of the permafrost area and much other valuable information about permafrost.)

Permafrost covers almost a quarter of the northern hemisphere and contains 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon, twice that currently in the atmosphere, and could significantly amplify global warming should thawing accelerate as expected, according to a new report by the United Nations Environmental Program. A quantity of this is already in the form of carbon dioxide and methane trapped in the ice, and more will be converted to these compounds by microbial action as the permafrost layer melts, then it escapes into the atmosphere. This forms what is known as a positive feedback. As the warming increases, the rate of release will increase and still more warming will occur as a result, producing more gases. The microbes do not have to be added by contamination, they are already there, ready to “go to work” when thawing occurs.

The source of the carbon is huge amounts of organic matter accumulated over tens to hundreds of thousands of years, buried as the land froze. The permafrost is as much as half a mile thick in places. Where air can get to the organic matter carbon is oxidized to carbon dioxide, and where it can not, anaerobic decomposition results in methane.

The sometime notion that farming can simply be moved North is a fantasy. Subsurface permafrost blocks the descent of water, so it ponds on the surface, forming wetlands.

The surface of thawed permafrost is weak and irregular due to frozen and thawing pockets of water in it. This disrupts buildings, roads, power lines, and other structures, such as drainage ditches, subsurface pipelines (sewers and water) that are needed for concentrations of human habitation.

The big question is quantification of the result of thawing permafrost. How much? How soon? There is very little research about these maters. Vast expenditure would be required to study one-quarter of the Northern Hemisphere at a scale that would give a reasonable level of accuracy. May of the stations studying the effect would have to be in very remote, isolated places. However, we know well that it will happen because there are signs of it now. Pictures of methane escaping from thawing lakes, also here and here. Escaping methane can be measured for a particular area.

Methane leaks under the sea, as well as on land are also known. Scientific American points to an article from the research journal Nature Geoscience which claims over 150,000 such leaks have been found.

We know that sources of carbon exposed at the surface will decompose producing 40% more carbon dioxide and methane than sources that remain buried, but the rate at which they decompose is unknown. However, it is certainly significant, judging from the observations in the previous paragraph.

Aware of this, what should be done? It is a very human tendency to ignore bad news, something we all recognize as being a very bad policy. Those that are making money avoiding bad news will be particularly hard to convince to accept any new policy.

Most problems can be solved by incremental advance and waiting for results.. Most problems will get better in time if the cause is removed. Obviously that procedure isn’t being used with contaminating the atmosphere, and the positive feedbacks.

Where gluttonous continuation of technology that contaminates the atmosphere is involved, it seems a particularly bad idea to throw out the precautionary principle, which is, “first, do no harm.” To let business economics and finance driven politics make decisions about what is essentially an earth scale geology question, “What will happen when the permafrost melts?” is utterly foolhardy.

It’s extreme events that make headlines, but it’s the long view that should make us worried.