INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
In 2012, Sue Natali arrived in Duvanny Yar, Siberia, for the first time
Then a postdoctoral research fellow studying the effects of thawing permafrost due to climate change, she had seen photos of this site many
Rapid thawing at Duvanny Yar had caused a massive ground collapse & a &mega slump& & like a giant sinkhole in the middle of the Siberian
But nothing had prepared her for seeing it in person.
As you walk along you see what look like logs poking out the permafrost
But they aren&t logs, they are the bones of mammoths and other Pleistocene animals & Sue Natali
&It was incredible, really incredible&, she
recalls while speaking to me from The Woods Hole Research Center, Massachusetts, where she is an associate scientist
&I still get chills when I think about it… I just couldn&t believe the magnitude: collapsing cliffs the size of multi-storey buildings …
and as you walk along you see what look like logs poking out the permafrost
But they aren&t logs, they are the bones of mammoths and other Pleistocene animals.&
What Natali describes is the visible, dramatic effects
of a rapidly warming Arctic
The permafrost & up until now, permanently frozen land and soil & is thawing out, and revealing its hidden secrets
Alongside Pleistocene fossils are massive carbon and methane emissions, toxic mercury, and ancient diseases.
(Credit: Sue Natali)The rapid
thawing of permafrost causes "mega slumps" that puncture the landscape like the holes in swiss cheese (Credit: Sue Natali)The organic-rich
permafrost holds an estimated 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon
&That about twice as much carbon in the atmosphere, and three times as much carbon than that stored in all the world forests&, says Natali
She explains that between 30% and 70% of the permafrost may melt before 2100, depending on how effectively we respond to climate change
&The 70% is business as usual, if we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, and 30% is if we vastly reduce our fossil fuel
emissions… Of the 30-70% that thaws, the carbon locked up in organic matter will begin to be broken down by microbes, they use it as fuel
or energy, and they release it as CO2 or methane.&
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biggest cities are fighting smogWhy Britain rains can&t sustain its thirstAround 10% of the carbon that does defrost will probably be
released as CO2, amounting to 130-150 billion tonnes
That is equivalent to the current rate of total US emissions, every year until 2100
Melting permafrost effectively introduces a new country at number two on the highest emitters list, and one that isn&t accounted for in
&People talk about a carbon bomb,& says Natali
&In geological timescales this is not a slow release
It is a pool of carbon that is locked away and is not accounted for in the carbon budget to keep rises below two degrees (Celsius).&
The
Northern Hemisphere winter of 2018/2019 was dominated by headlines of the &polar vortex&, as temperatures plummeted unusually far south into
In South Bend, Indiana, it reached -29C in January 2019, almost twice as low as the city previous record set in 1936
What such stories masked, however, was that the opposite was happening in the far North, beyond the Arctic circle
January 2019 also saw Arctic sea ice average just 13.56 million square kilometres (5.24 million square miles), some 860,000 square
kilometres (332,000 square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average, and only slightly above the record low reached in January
2018.
(Credit: Alamy)Melting ice can release methane, which will exacerbate global warming (Credit: Alamy)In November, when temperatures
should have been -25C, a temperature of 1.2C above freezing was recorded at the North Pole
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world (in part due to the loss of solar reflectivity).
&We are seeing a big increase
in the thaw of permafrost&, confirms Emily Osborne, program manager for the Arctic Research Program, NOAA, and editor of the Arctic Report
Card, an annual peer-reviewed environmental study of the Arctic
As a direct result of rising air temperatures, she says, the permafrost is thawing and &the landscape is physically crumbling as a result…
things are changing so fast, and in ways that researchers hadn&t even anticipated.&
The headline of the 2017 Arctic Report Card pulled no
punches: &Arctic shows no sign of returning to a reliably frozen region&
One paper co-authored by Hanne Christiansen, professor and vice dean of education at University Centre Svalbard, Norway, studied permafrost
temperatures at a depth of 20 metres (that's 65ft, far enough down not to be affected by short-term seasonal changes) and found temperatures
had risen by up to 0.7C since 2000
Christiansen, who is also president of the International Permafrost Association, tells me, &temperatures are increasing inside the
permafrost at relatively high speed… then, of course, what was permanently frozen before can become released.& In 2016, the autumn
temperatures in Svalbard remained above zero throughout November, &the first time this has happened in the records that we have, going back
to 1898&, says Christiansen
&Then large amounts of rain came & the precipitation here is typically snow… we had mudslides crossing roads for 100s of metres… we had
to evacuate some parts of the population.&
(Credit: Getty Images)The melting permafrost is transforming Alaska's landscapes (Credit:
Alamy)In some places in the Alaskan Arctic, you fly over a swiss cheese of land and lakes formed by ground collapse & Sue Natali
The rapid
change in North American permafrost is equally alarming
&In some places in the Alaskan Arctic, you fly over a swiss cheese of land and lakes formed by ground collapse,& says Natali, whose
fieldwork has moved from Siberia to Alaska
&Water that was close to the surface now becomes a pond.& Many of these ponds are bubbling with methane, as microbes suddenly find
themselves with a feast of ancient organic matter to munch on, releasing methane as a by-product
&We often walk across the lakes because it so shallow and it like you&re in a hot tub in some places, there is so much bubbling,& says
Natali.
(Credit: Alamy)The melting permafrost released anthrax in Siberia (Credit: Alamy)But methane and CO2 are not the only things being
released from the once frozen ground
In the summer of 2016, a group of nomadic reindeer herders began falling sick from a mysterious illness
Rumours began circling of the &Siberian plague&, last seen in the region in 1941
When a young boy and 2,500 reindeer died, the disease was identified: anthrax
Its origin was a defrosting reindeer carcass, a victim of an anthrax outbreak 75 years previously
The 2018 Arctic report card speculates that, &diseases like the Spanish flu, smallpox or the plague that have been wiped out might be frozen
in the permafrost.& A French study in 2014 took a 30,000 year-old virus frozen within permafrost, and warmed it back up in the lab
It promptly came back to life, 300 centuries later
(To read more, see BBC Earth piece on the diseases hidden in ice.)
Adding to this apocalyptic vision, in 2016 the Doomsday Vault & a
sub-permafrost facility in Arctic Norway, which safeguards millions of crop seeds for perpetuity & was breached with meltwater
And listed amongst the membership of The Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost, is Swedish Nuclear Waste Management who presumably also
rely on a permanently frozen permafrost (when BBC Future approached them for comment on this point, they did not respond).
Long-preserved
human archaeology may also be emerging, but just as quickly lost
A frozen Palaeo-Eskimo site in Greenland, preserved for some 4,000 years, is at risk of being washed away
This is just one of an estimated 180,000 archaeological sites preserved in the permafrost, often with soft tissues and clothing that
uniquely remain intact but would rot quickly if exposed
Adam Markham, of the Union of Concerned Scientists has said, &with rapid, human-caused climate change, many sites or the artefacts they
contain, will be lost before they have been discovered.&
More modern (and unwanted) human detritus will, however, not rot away: marine
Due to circular global marine currents, much plastic waste ends up in the Arctic, where it becomes frozen in sea ice or permafrost
A recent study of marine micro-particles demonstrated that concentrations were higher in the Arctic Basin than all other ocean basins in the
Microplastic concentrations in the Greenland Sea doubled between 2004 and 2015
&Scientists are finding that those microplastics are accumulating across the entire ocean and being dumped into the Arctic&, explains
&This is something we didn&t [previously] realise was a problem
What scientists are trying to find out now is the composition of these microplastics, what sort of fish are feeding on these… and whether
we are essentially eating microplastics through eating these fish.&
(Credit: Alamy)In 2016 the Doomsday Vault & a sub-permafrost facility
in Arctic Norway, which safeguards millions of crop seeds for perpetuity & was breached with meltwater (Credit: Alamy)Mercury is also
entering the food chain, thanks to thawing permafrost
The Arctic is home to the most mercury on the planet
The US Geological Survey estimates there a total of 1,656,000 tonnes of mercury trapped in polar ice and permafrost: roughly twice the
global amount in all other soils, oceans, and atmosphere
Natali explains that, &mercury often binds up with organic material in places where you have high organic matter content… organism bodies
don&t remove it, so it bio-accumulates up the food web
Permafrost is almost the perfect storm & you have a lot of mercury in permafrost, it is released into wetland systems, those are the right
environment for organisms to take them up, and then [it] heads up the food web
That a concern for wildlife, people, and the commercial fishing industry.&
Are there some positives of a thawing Arctic Could a greener
Arctic start to see more trees and vegetation take root, sequestering more carbon and offering new grazing land for animals Osborne agrees
that &the Arctic is greening&
But she adds that studies of animal populations actually suggest that, &warmer temperatures also increase the prevalence of viruses and
disease, so we&re seeing a lot more caribou and reindeer becoming more sickly as a result of this warming climate… it is just not an
environment that is suited to thrive at these warmer temperatures.& Natali also says that many areas are experiencing &Tundra browning&: the
higher temperatures lead surface water to evaporate into the atmosphere, causing plants to die off
Other areas are experiencing sudden flooding due to the ground collapsing
&It not happening in 2100 or 2050, it now&, says Natali
&You hear people say ‘we used to pick blueberries over there&, and you look over there and it a wetland.&
Natali doesn&t want to end the
There is a lot we can do, she says
The fate of the Arctic is not a foregone conclusion: &The actions taken by the international community will have a substantial impact on
just how much carbon will be released and how much of the permafrost will thaw
We need to keep as much of the permafrost as we can frozen
And we do have some control of that.& Our emissions cannot remain &business as usual&
And we depend on the Arctic.dramatic effects of a rapidly warming Arcticdramatic effects of a rapidly warming Arctic
