by Playfuls Staff |
16th June 2006
Permafrost, the frozen Syberian soil, could be the next big destructive thing for Earth's atmosphere. It is the ice tomb of millions of animals and plants that have lived in that area [more]in the past, including the mammoths, and their bones are now about to rise.
The global warming affects the icey soil and the inevitable thaw cuould unleash thousands of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, much more than the amount released into the atmosphere each year by the burning of fossil fuels, the researchers said in a statement. The carbon could have a deadly impact since it would definitely overpass the processing capacity of all forests in the world today. And let's not forget that all around the world an area the size of two soccer fields is being eradicated for agriculture or even drug-farming (the case of tropical forrests in Columbia, Cambodgia, Laos or Myanmar).
"There's a huge pool of carbon, even more than people thought before, perhaps double the amount of carbon that we thought," said Schuur, one of the article's co-authors. "If you have twice as much carbon there, essentially in the future twice as much could be released into the atmosphere."
Although it is not the only place on Earth's surface to contain permafrost (other areas include Alaska, Northern Canada and Europe) the Syberian one covers by far the largest territory (nearly 400,000 square miles) and has runs deeper than all the others (about 82 feet below). It contains more than 500 billion metric tons of carbon which is double than previous estimates made by researchers.
The main factor responsable for global warming today is the fossil fuel, which accounts for 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide thrown into the atmosphere annually. As a comparison, the quantity of carbon contained in the permafrost is about 75 times bigger... The thawing of permafrost is endagering the atmosphere and of course the Polar Ice, which could melt even more rapidly than it does today.
The research team concluded that previous studies on global warming had not taken into account the deep carbon reserve trapped in permafrost in the northern plains of Siberia and central Alaska. "It's like finding a new continent under the Earth," lead author Sergey Zimov said in a telephone interview from northern Siberia.
He said the vast, carbon-rich area had been buried over many millennia by a unique layer of wind-borne loess dust that covered bones of mammoth, bison, saber-toothed tigers and the abundant grasses they fed on, then froze about 10,000 years ago into permafrost (http://www.latimes.com/news/). A 2005 study by the U.S. Center for Atmospheric Research estimated that about 10 feet of permafrost would melt in the 21st century, meaning billions of tons of gases could be released if global warming was not slowed or halted.
"Because this is a very sensitive sort of climate, if the permafrost begins to melt, billions of gallons of greenhouse gases will be released from these ancient soils," Zimov said.
On the other side, Schuur said "it's not hopeless; we're just at the beginning of this cycle, so we can, through the controlling of emissions, have a hope of slowing down this rate of global warming that would slow the melt of the permafrost."
